Functionality of Traditional Hard Drive
A traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD) has a spindle holding one or a number of mirror-like hard rotating platters. A motor spins these platters and an actuator arm moves over them. The actuator arm moves from centre to edge and read or write data through its tiny heads.
Functionality of Solid State Drive
A Solid State Drive (SSD) is composed of electronic components that are based entirely on semiconductors. Since any moving parts are not available in SSD drives, it offers significantly reduced risk of mechanical failures. SSD provides higher sequential as well as random data read/write rates and for this reason solid state drives perform better than hard disk drives.
Following table compares Traditional HDD with SSD.
| Comparison Points | Classic HDD | SSD Drives |
| Access Time | HDD takes around 5,000 to 10,000 μs to access the data. | SSD takes around 35 to 100 μs to access the data hence it is nearly 100x faster. |
| Reliability | The HDD has moving parts and magnetic platters, they may fail when we use it more. | The SSD drive has no moving parts. There is almost negligible possibility of failures. |
| Operating System Boot Time | Average bootup time is around 40 seconds. | Average bootup time is around 22 seconds. |
| Average File Write/Copy Speed | 50 MB/s to 120 MB/s | 200 MB/s to 500 MB/s |
| Defragmentation | Required | Not Required |
| Cost | Low | High |
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