We got some feedback from readers of our piece on installing Windows on a solid state drive (SSD) asking if we’d do a bit of a beginners’ guide to the SSD vs. HDD debate, so that’s what we’ll be doing today. The fact is, there are a number of reasons to move on up to an SSD that you might already be familiar with, but there are also plenty of reasons to stick with a HDD that aren’t often considered.

For anyone reading who doesn’t yet know the physical differences between a HDD and an SSD, don’t worry, we’ll explain those shortly, so nobody will be entirely lost. A hard disk (or HDD) is the drive you’re most likely to find if you cracked open the machine you’re using now (unless you’re reading this from a netbook). It is, as the name suggests, fundamentally a spinning disk (or platter), to which data is written or read by a head. The arrangement doesn’t look entirely unlike an old vinyl record player.

This lovely example shot of a HDD comes courtesy of the folks at Wikipedia

More recently, we’ve seen the introduction of solid-state drives, or SSDs. The idea with SSDs is that they cut out the need to actually have a platter spinning to read/write to it. Instead, they’re based on solid-state memory, which means that they don’t have the same kind of mechanical delay or noise as a HDD. They’re also that bit tougher than HDDs. If you consider that combination you’ll quickly see why they’re so attractive for the notebook and netbook markets. The biggest issue with SSDs tends to be their cost, which is significantly higher than that of a HDD.

Capacity and Price

One of the things we’ve come to understand as a fact of life is that space is cheap. Sadly, this is only true in the HDD world, and doesn’t quite pull through in the land of solid-state storage. Naturally, you can find yourself some very expensive high-speed HDDs, but as a rule, they’re a reasonably inexpensive way to store a relatively large amount of material.

There's a lot of charm to the simplicty of an SSD. It's practically inert.

Meanwhile, on the SSD front the odds are you’re going to pay through the nose for capacity. It’s the price you pay for cutting edge hardware and, while some might not consider SSDs to be cutting edge, they’re still up there. As a little bit of a comparison, we’ve put together a comparison of the prices of two of our different HDD and SSD offerings so you can see the difference between the two.

The first is Samsung’s Spinpoint F1 1TB SATA offering, which is one of the cheaper internal 1TB drives at €79. It’s nice and quiet and gets the job done, though naturally it gets the speeds you might expect from a HDD, rather than an SSD. You can check it out, here. By contrast, the highest capacity SSD we carry is Corsair’s 256GB model, which tips the scales at a pricey €599. You can check that out, here. There are, of course, lower capacity models

As you can see, the price-per-gigabyte ratio is far better when it comes to HDD, but for those of you seriously considering picking up an SSD, what you have in mind is almost certainly speed, rather than capacity.

Corsair's 256GB SSD offering. Excellent speed, but you'll have to pay for it.

Speed and Performance
Usually, the biggest reason you’ll hear for people moving to SSDs over HDDs is because of the speed they offer. The whole idea here is for you to cut down on one of the biggest bottlenecks in any machine, which should ensure your system is that bit more nimble across a wide range of different tasks.

There are issues with this speed though, not least of which is the fact that your OS is almost certainly going to be a big block when it comes to getting the most out of your SSD. As has been pointed out at great length here it seems as though Windows Vista just was not built with solid-state drives in mind. While there have been improvements made since the Vista was released, it’s still not ideal. Check out the link for more details, there are some excellent graphs there, well worth investigating.

Similarly, Sandisk has actually pointed out that the issues people were having with their SSDs were often issues with Windows Vista more than the hardware.

Even Samsung's SSDs look lovely.

So, if we work under the assumption that you’re using an OS that can utilise your SSD reasonably well, we also have to work on the assumption that you’ve set it up in such a manner that your OS won’t harm it through repeated writes to particular portions of the disk, an issue particularly prevalent under Windows XP. You can read more about making your XP install kinder to your SSD in this excellent thread on OCZ’s forums here, but the basic gist is that you’ll have to do a little work to make sure your OS is SSD friendly.

So, working under the assumption that you’re running a slightly tweaked Windows XP or the Windows 7 RC (which, by all accounts, is very happy to run from an SSD without too much poking) then you should see far better performance from an SSD than a HDD. What’s nice is that, as has been variously reported around the web, the areas where the average user is most likely to actually notice an improvement in their machine after moving to an SSD are the boot time (which reportedly can be dropped to as low as 14 seconds for Windows XP) and application launching, which would be understandably improved.

An excellent article went live on ComputerWorld on Friday just gone that gets down to the nitty gritty with a laptop with an SSD and a not-too-high-performance HDD. While the SSD does perform orders of magnitude better in practically every test, when it comes down to practical applications there seems to be relatively little difference between the two. The clearest example of this comes when copying a 1GB folder of photos and videos to the SSD/HDD. The SSD managed it in 50 seconds, while the HDD does it in 52… you eventually have to wonder if the SSD is being utilised properly.

You can check out the ComputerWorld SSD/HDD test article here.

Looks like there aren't many SSDs that look as nice as the OCZ at the top.

Closing
The question, as with the article on moving your OS to an SSD, will be whether or not it’s worth the money to pick up an SSD and replace their internal drive with it. The answer is that if you’re thinking in those terms then it almost certainly isn’t. The fact is that HDDs have lasted so long in their current incarnation because they work. They’re fast enough to get the job done and cheap enough that you don’t break the bank doing it. Moreover, you can pick up a high-speed HDD for far less than an SSD and still see blistering speed.

The best way to consider an SSD is as a way to augment a system you’re already quite happy with – some of the best advice we’ve heard on the subject is simply to pick up a nice small SSD (since they’re so much cheaper at lower capacities) and install an OS and your most often used used applications on it, keeping your nice, cheap, high capacity HDD around for data. Win-win, for those looking to squeeze their boot times and application load times down without breaking the bank, at least.