HDD and SSD

HDD and SSD

Hard Drive

• The hard drive will store all of the computer data including programs, games, photos, videos, music and so on. Windows is also stored on the hard drive. The more space the hard drive has, the more programs and files the hard drive can store.

Hard Drive Storage Space

• Hard drive storage space is measured in TB (Terabytes), GB (Gigabytes) or MB (Megabytes).

  1TB = 1,000GB

  1GB = 1,000MB (Megabytes)

  Many hard drives these days will have around 500GB – 2TB in space. One game may use under 1GB of space, but some games use or over 50GB, so they do vary a lot. As a guide, for most people, having 1TB – 2TB of hard drive storage space will allow enough room for all the games, photos, music, programs and anything else you want to throw onto your PC.

Hard Drive Speed

• Every hard drive will have a speed rating. The speed rating is how fast data can be read from the drive (read speed) and how fast data can be written to the drive (write speed). The read/write speeds of a hard drive are measured in MB/s (Megabytes per second).

  So for example, let's suppose you have a game on your computer, or to be more specific, on your hard drive. When you click on that said game to start it up, the hard drive will be read from. If you have a fast hard drive that has a read speed of 500MB/s, the game might start up in, let's say, 30 seconds. But using a slower hard drive that has a read speed of under 100MB/s might mean that that same game will take over 2 minutes to load.

Different

Types Of Hard Drives

• There are three types of hard drives to choose from... those drives are:

  HDD (Hard Disk Drive)

• SSD (Solid State Drive)

• SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive)

HDD (Hard Disk Drive)

HDDs have been used for many years and are still very much in use today. They are mechanical drives with disks (called platters) inside them that spin round. Heads inside the drive will move back and forth over the disks to read data from them and write data to them.

They are generally the slowest of the three hard drives, but they're also the cheapest.

SSD (Solid State Drive)

SSDs (Solid State Drives) have no moving parts. They're like a big USB flash drive in the way that they store data on a circuit board housed inside a casing. Because they have no moving parts, they are completely silent and they are, by a long way, the fastest of the three drives, but they're also the most expensive.

SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive)

A 'Solid State Hybrid Drive' is often called 'Hybrid Drive' for short, or SSHD as we'll call it. SSHDs have a HDD and a SSD inside them. A typical 1TB SSHD will have a 1TB HDD and an 8GB SSD.

Even though SSHDs have two drives (SSD and HDD) housed inside one physical drive, they are seen by Windows as one hard drive.

SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive)

Files that are accessed regularly are added to the SSD part of the drive automatically. This means that starting up the PC and loading regularly used programs will be done faster compared to using a HDD. The SSHD will automatically store files that don't need fast access to the HDD part of the drive, such as music and photos.

Multiple Choice

Most durable?

• HDD
• SSD
• CD-ROM
• DVD-RW

Multiple Choice

Cheapest?

• SSD
• HDD
• CD-RW
• Micro SD card

Multiple Choice

Which best describes solid state storage?

• Uses magnetic fields to read/write data onto a chip
• Uses electricity to read/write data onto a disc
• Uses a laser to read/write data onto a chip.
• Uses electricity to read/write data onto a chip

Multiple Choice

Which best describes magnetic storage?

• Uses magnetic fields to read/write data onto a metal disc.
• Uses electronic pulses to read/write data onto a metal disc
• Uses a magnetic chip to store data
• Uses a laser to read/write data onto a metal disc

Multiple Choice

How many bytes in a kilobyte?

• 2024
• 1024
• 1000
• 8

Multiple Choice

Which ISN'T an example of secondary storage?

• RAM
• SSD
• USB memory
• CD-RW

Multiple Choice

What BEST describes secondary storage?

• Stores data permanently without the need for electricity
• Stores data temporarily whilst the computer is turned on
• Fetches data from RAM and processes it
• Stores the boot up instructions for the computer

Multiple Choice

Which of these acts as primary storage?

• ROM
• RAM
• HDD or SSD
• CPU

Multiple Select

SSD has the following features (tick 2):

• lightweight

• moving parts

• very cheap

• expensive

Multiple Choice

Which of these is the best choice for storage in a mobile phone?

• SD Card

• SSD

• HDD

• DVD

• Floppy Disk

Multiple Choice

Which if these is the best choice for internal storage in a laptop?

• DVD

• SSD

• HDD

• Blue-ray

• ROM

Multiple Choice

How is data stored?

• Binary values

• Black and White

• Red or Blue

• Analogue

• Pixels

Multiple Choice

SSHD is a combination of both HDD and SSHD.

• True

• False