SATA Hard Disks Vs SSD, Because Flash Isn’t Always Good

Interested in getting a whole lot of data from one place to another? Get ready for the USB enclosure face off where we pit SATA hard drives and HDD enclosures against high volume portable SDD drives.

When it comes to a large, cost effective enclosure the 1.8 inch portable SATA pocket sized hard disk is definitely a good option.

So you want to take your work files home and your home files to work but you just can’t find the space? Welcome to the modern world.

There’s a couple of devices out now that can solve your problems… the portable USB hard drive and Solid State Drive (SSD) bus drives but which one is right for you?

If the computer users of the 1980’s and 1990’s looked at the amount of memory that was available to us and the amount of gigabytes we chew up they’d be shocked.

After all, in 1995 consumers were content with a memory of 256MB. While that might have been cavernous back then it’s now the capacity of a thirty dollar MP3 player from Wal-Mart.

These days Hard Disk Drives (HDD) are smaller, faster, more secure, stable and hold more data. An internal hard drive can be anything from 20GB to 500GB and even the average SATA hard drive enclosure has a memory capacity of 20GB to 200GB.

Solid State Drives (SSD) are also hitting the news. Most people know SSD as flash drives (which are named after the software) and expect to find them on USB pen drives and other external memory devices as well as portable media players like the Apple iPod and iPhone.

So when you’re talking external memory drivers What’s better? SATA HDD or SSD?

The Pros Of SATA Hard Disk Drives

• SATA HDD costs less per gigabyte
• Sata allows for hot disconnects

Sata is infinitely more cost-effective than SSD

Because SSD drives are a relatively new development they are more expensive to make than Hard Disk Drives.

How much so?

Last year Samsung (engadget.com/2007/04/25/ssd-prices-in-freefall-wont-overtake-hard-disks-anytime-soon/) released a study showing it expected the price for manufacturing a hard drive to be US sixty cents a gigabyte to make in 2010.

They didn’t release exact figures for solid state drives (Samsung is one of the world’s largest manufactures of SSD) but various computer models put it between two dollars fifty US and ninety cents US per GB, which is not so hot when you think now most computer memory can be 500GB or more.

So people looking for a truly voluminous memory in a SATA USB enclosure without whipping out their gold cards are definitely advised to get a portable HDD.

‘Hot Exits’ are a safer option with SATA Hard Disk Drives

One of the worst things you can do with a Flash disk, whether it’s just a USB pen drive or a big sizable SSD bus drive is to unplug it from your computer without switching it off.

There’s a good chance the data on it will be wiped completely. That’s not a problem that you’ve got to worry about with the SATA Hard Disk Drive.

While we like to think ourselves of thoughtful, conscientious computer users the setup of the USB enclosure and HDD enclosures makes it all too easy to just unplug the device.

With the portable USB hard drive you’ve got an extra safety net in that all the data is stored on a spinning disk which means it’s got time to wind down when it’s unplugged… SSD have no such luxury.

The Cons Of SATA Hard Disk Drives

They’re not the fastest things on earth

There can be no doubt if you want really quick data processing speeds and that’s all that you want then SSD is definitely the way to go. SSD can be up to two or three times faster than a HDD (As the wonderfully ‘down to earth’ writers of Engadget (engadget.com/2007/04/25/ssd-prices-in-freefall-wont-overtake-hard-disks-anytime-soon/) say “so fast you’d think it was being chased”).

Once that’s said and done though you’re not exactly using a hard drive external enclosure for its speed… it’s more for its portability and volume. And with new technology USB 2.0 high speed connection will pump the files out at 480Mbps. That isn’t slow by a long shot.

If you’re looking for a solution to your data storage and data transfer problems right now you will struggle to do better than a SATA HDD drive. It costs a fraction of the price of a SDD drive and is friendlier towards hot extractions than SDD drives will ever be.