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jsf8x

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 28, 2010
424
0
I actually don't know what both stand for lol, let alone the actual differences, pros and cons of these two different hard drives


Thanks!
 
SSDs are faster, more reliable, consume less energy and therefore produce less heat. Their only drawback is the price per capacity ratio-- because they're still rather new technology.

Swapping your computer's hdd for an ssd will probably be the biggest performance difference you could notice.


What areas does an SSD give you faster speed in? Almost everything really. Storage drives read and write data: things like opening photos in preview, opening an application, booting the computer up, emptying the trash, recording live video and transferring files are all majorly dependent on storage drives.

SSDs also don't use a spinning platter to operate, so your computer will produce less noise, and will be more resistant to sudden vibration/shaking.
 
HDD via SEARCH "hdd"
SSD via SEARCH "ssd"

Threads via MRoogle

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/968077/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/947185/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/900780/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/892274/

In short, an HDD is mechanical with rotating platters and is slow (75 - 100 MB/s), an SSD is faster to non-volatile flash memory, no mechanical parts and getting speeds of up to 225MB/s and faster and it consumes less energy.

HDDs are cheap, SSDs are expensive.
 
a hard disk drive spins, as it is a disk.
a solid state drive is solid.... ergo it doesn't spin.

Realistically, it means that the SSD performs much faster, if taken care of, and uses less energy - hence prolonging battery life.

Practically, OS X doesn't have TRIM support yet (which is what takes care of the SSD) so over time it will slow down a little. They're also much more expensive than an HDD.

Generally, if you don't know if you need one or not, you don't.
 
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