What Is Hard Disk? Comparisons Among SSD, HDD and SSHD 

About Hard Disk

What is hard disk? Hard disk, or hard drive is an electromechanical data storage device. It is also used for retrieving digital information. Hard disk is one of the main media of computer.

For its structure, it is composed of one or more discs, which are made of aluminum, and the rapidly rotating disks (or platters) are coated with magnetic material.

For its types, there are three common hard drive, namely SSD (Solid State Drive), HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and SSHD (Solid-state Hybrid Drive).

For its types of interface, there are three common kinds, like SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment), SCSI (Small Computer System Interface), and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI).

For its main developers, there are Seagate, Western Digital, TOSHIBA, and Samsung.

Basic Information for SSD & HDD & SSHD

Knowing what is hard disk, let’s see some basic information about its three types.

SSD

Its full name is Solid State Drive that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently. It is also sometimes called a solid-state device or a solid-state disk.

This kind of drive is made up from fixed flash memory which has no moving parts. It uses flash-memory chips for storage.

HDD

The full name of HDD is Hard Disk Drive. This kind of drive has the rapidly spinning, circular platters and a read-write head which can move across them physically and scan for your wanted data parts. That’s why you can hear some noise when it is running.

HDD uses magnetic disks for storage.

SSHD

SSHD is a logical or physical storage device that combines a faster storage medium such as solid-state drive (SSD) with a higher-capacity hard disk drive (HDD), so it is called hybrid.

The SSD part is just used as the temporary storage to speed things up, and your data is saved long-tern in mechanical disk. Therefore, you can take it as the ultimate solution for storage and performance with budget.

Comparisons Among the Three Hard Disks

Size:

For SSD, it comes in small size, since it doesn’t have motor, disk, read head. Therefore, it is more suitable to use it as laptop hard drive.

For HDD, it is a traditional hard disk which come in large size, which is not convenient for thinner computer users. 

For SSHD, it tends to be laptop size, which is often referred to as 2.5 inches. But please pay attention to that many laptops only have room for drives 7mm high, but some SSHDs are 9.5mm high.

Capability and Price:

Compared with hard drives and SSHD, SSD is more expensive in terms of dollar per gigabyte. For example, a 1TB internal 2.5-inch HDD costs between $40 and $60, but the very cheapest SSD of the same capacity and form factor starts at around $125.

Performance:

This is a shine for SSD. You can enjoy a fast booting speed if you use SSD, but you will enjoy a low speed if you use HDD, because the latter requires time to speed up to operating specs. What’s more, it will continue to be slower than an SSD during normal use.

Compared with a SATA SSD, SSHD runs slower, but it is faster than a plain old hard disk.

Noise:

Faster hard drives will make more noise than those that are slower. But SSD makes no noise at all, since it is non-mechanical.

In conclusion, hard drives have advantages on price and capacity. SSDS surpass them in terms of speed, no noise, and size. And SSHDs take the advantage in terms of storage and performance with budget.

If you are only concerned about storage, you can choose HDD; about performance, you can choose SSD; about storage, performance and price, you can choose SSHD.

If SSD overcomes shortcomings in price and capacity, it would be the hands-down winner.

By the way, if you get a new hard drive, and want to use it in your computer without reinstalling Windows, you can try to use Migrate OS to SSD/HD Wizard, a function in MiniTool Partition Wizard, to complete the operation.