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#0041 Spinning Rust vs SSD
INSERT GRAPHIC HEREOld School / New School
Computers over a certain age will have a mechanical harddrive. It
involves one or more spinning platters and a read/write head on the end of an arm.
If you open one, it looks like an old record player on the inside. The drive motor
will spin the platter into position and the head will read a single block of data.
As it continues spinning, each rotation allows it to read another block. It does
this over and over as needed. A file can be a single block or thousands of blocks.
This is a slow process and it isn't fast enough to keep up with today's modern
processors. The drives have motors and consume more power. They are sensitive to
movement such as drops and sudden impacts. It's possible for large magnets can
scramble the data. The drives are hermetically sealed (air tight). If air gets
inside, they can rust from the humidity. Hence the term 'spinning rust'. Any
defects on the platters will cause retries, which are perceived as a slow drive or
will cause data errors. Common drive capacities within the last 5-7 years are are
500G and 1TB.
New Tech
A Solid State Drive (SSD) is newer technolgy with many advantages. An
SSD is comprised entirely of computer chips. It has no moving parts. It's physically
smaller and uses less power. Less power consumption means that laptops batteries
will last longer. There is nothing magnetic to get scrambled. All computers
manufactured today use an SSD as the drive for the main operating system. Common
drive capacities within the last 5-7 years are are 500G, 1TB and 2TB. An SSD is
still more expensive than a spinning harddrive, but the speed benefits far outweight
the cost. This represents a huge improvement over spinning drives.
Sata SSD Drives
SATA
SSDSSD's come mainly in 2 forms for home computers. A SATA SSD is intended
to be used when upgrading an older desktop or laptop computer that originally had a
mechanical / spinning drive. They are the exact same size as a 2.5 inch laptop
harddrive. It can connect to the same connector and uses the same SATA interface.
It's the intermediate option to upgrade a computer that lacks an NVME port. Using
one in a desktop will normally require a proper mounting bracket.
NVME Drives
NVME
SSDA NVME drive is a different type of SSD. It used the same general
technology but uses a different connection found directly on the motherboard. This
connection ties directly into the PCIE bus It's capable of even greater speeds than
the SSD.
Mechanical Drives
Inside of a mechanical harddrive
There is still a use case for mechanical drives. New high capacity drives are still
being developed. They are being used to provide MASS storage at a very economical
price. At the time of this article, there are spinning drives that will hold as much
as 30TB. This is great option for files that are less frequently used.
