Capacity issues with SSD Drives

[Tufan]

I have a LG Desktop system with a windows xp operating system , 2GB of RAM, and a HDD drive as an internal hard disk. I wanted to know how does a SSD drive differ from a traditional hard disk drive. I have also heard that the SSD drives have some capacity problems and these drives cannot be filled to full their extent. If in case my hard disk drive goes faulty should I replace with the similar traditional one or a SSD?

[Aandaleeb]

Hard disk drives or HDDs are used to store the digital data and the data stored in it is non-volatile. A HDD is made up of a circular spindle that holds one or more than one circular rotating disks called platters. The data is stored on the Platters in the binary form i.e 1 and 0. A pointed metal head which is sharp at one end moves on these platters to read and write the data. This metal head is attached to an axis called Actuator axis and moves like an arm on the platter. This was all about the HDDs but I do not have much knowledge as far as the SSDs are concerned.

[T.J.]

I appreciate your valuable knowledge about the Hard disk drives. Unlike a HDD, SSD or a solid state drive does not have any moving device or platters, instead it is composed of electromechanical devices and microchips that store the data in a non volatile form. The data stored in SSDs is much more persistent. But the Solid State Drives are much more costlier than the HDDs.

[ApPy10]

The most striking limitation of the HDD drive is that as the data filling approaches closer to it's full capacity, the O/S tries to store the data in each an every free bit available . This causes latency in the system, the data is fetched at slower speed and so it degrades the performance of the computer as well. The Solid State drives overcome this latency issue but these drives too have some limitations as far as the capacity is concerned. When the drive is filled up to it's capacity, it gives some issues while writing the data as the SSD provide less number of write cycles. These drives use wear levelling technology in which each oocupied cell needs to be freed before it can be written further.

[mathews]

If you are ready to spend more then I would suggest you to buy a SSD drive rather than HDD. HDD drives later on face lot of latency problems and are prone to power failures. This is where SSDs work much better than the HDDs but at higher cost. HDDs use NAND based flash memory that can work even without power as these memories use batteries to read the data and provide faster access.