Hard drive vs Solid state drive

Although most laptops are supplied with standard hard drives, more and more laptops are available with solid state drives (SSD). Standard mechanical hard drives contain moving parts and metal heads rotate over magnetic surface. On the other hand, you can keep data on a flash memory since it doesn’t have moving parts, therefore, SSDs are much faster, more reliable and incredibly energy-efficient. However, they cost a bit more than standard hard drives.

But after replacing your HDD with SSD you will feel a seismic shift in performing everyday tasks, such as opening applications and documents, copying files and download speed. If such tasks are important to you, then you’d better cash out and get an SSD instead of buying faster processor.

How much memory you need?

If you don’t play much and you are not planning to keep a large HD video library, then 120 GB of disk space should be enough to cater to your space requirements. To calculate your space requirements lets assume that your disk is 10% less than its technical specifications because information occupies this space to format the disk. Lets also assume that you need 15 to 40 GB for your operating system and virtual memory. Even if you install Adobe Photoshop, entire Microsoft Office Professional, and many more applications, 5 to 10 GB should be enough to fit most applications, excluding the games.

So how much space is occupied by your games, media files and other documents? Use of each gigabyte of space can be calculated, approximately:

• 16,000 pages of Word documents (assumption is based on doc format, docx format takes 2x less space).
• Around 1000 minutes of digital music.
• 320 digital photos.
• 1 hour of standard definition digital video.
• Approximately 30 mins DVD movie.
• Around 17 mins Full HD video (1080p).
• High-class games, like Crysis or World Of Warcraft occupy from 10 to 15 GB of disk space. Nevertheless, games like The Sims 3, as rule, use 5 to 7 GB.

Hence, you can store all that on a 128 GB SSD and you will still have enough space to keep:

• Operating system (depending on your operating system, including virtual memory and so on) - 20 to 30GB.
• Applications: Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and so forth - 10GB.
• Music: 5000 music files - 20GB.
• Photos: 3200 pictures - 10GB.
• HD Video: 5,5 hours (approximately) - 20GB.
• One Big Game - 15GB.

Total used memory - 105GB

Therefore, if you are a person who works with small amounts of video or edit photos or video professionally, small storage medium will be enough. Yet, today the smallest laptop with hard drive has 160 GB of storage space and it is not that hard to find relatively cheap laptop with 250 GB or 320 GB of storage space.

Despite its huge potential, not all solid state drives are same and some of them work slow. What really distinguishes good from bad is that its interface in connected to controller and inside the drive. Any laptop that is supplied with SSD connected to high-speed SATA port. However, there are netbooks that are supplied with solid state drives and some ultra portable models use PATA interface that is slower that hard drives. Make sure that platform-based SSD laptops use SATA not PATA port.

Before upgrading your hard drive to solid state drive it is necessary to read objective accounts of SSD and select those that could be purchased by you. Look for model with good controller chip. If you purchase a new laptop with built-in SSD you may not know the exact brand and model of such solid state drive. Fortunately, today most laptop manufacturers use high-quality storage media that have high speed controller made by Intel, Samsung or Toshiba.

The most important HDD features

If you decided to buy a laptop with an ordinary hard drive, the speed is a key factor to consider. If there is a choice between 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM, it is recommended to choose the latter one because it has higher rotation speed and data transfer speed. Modern 7200 RPM drives have a very good energy-saving function that means that they won’t have a substantial impact on laptop battery life. Even if you do not need large volumes to store information, we still recommend buying a hard drive with at least 250-320 GB capacity.