Is it wise to stick to the cheaper side of the expensive solid-state market?
Although prices are dropping for SSDs and have dropped quite some way over the last couple of years, compared to the prices of traditional spinners or HDDs, solid state is still very expensive. This isn’t by a small margin, either. The price difference is large, and you can buy spinner hard disks with three or four times the capacity as a same-priced SSD. If you’re looking for storage, this makes the older hard disk option by far more attractive.
Why, then, do people go for SSD options over the cheaper option? The main reason is simple – speed. SSDs offer by far the best data transfer speeds when compared to spinners, and for tasks that demand high performance, such as gaming and video editing, they really are the best option. SSD drives are also perfect for use as the system OS drive, making for a very fast and efficient operating system. A combination of OS SSD drive paired with a spinner drive or two for data storage can make for a very good system set up.
They’re highly desirable, but many believe you need to pay heavily for the privilege. This isn’t true, though, and you can find much cheaper SSD models around. The big question, however, remains. Are cheap SSDs worth the money or do they pale in comparison to the more expensive models. Do cheap drives perform well or does the lower price mean you’re going to get an inferior product? Finally, is the gap between SSD and HDD as wide as people say? Let’s find out.
The Speed’s The Thing
Cheaper SSDs are often demonstrably slower than more expensive models in terms of MB/s, but even slower SSDs are faster than most HDDs. Some would argue that even a relatively poor quality SSD is still worth going for in order to speed up your system, and as your OS drive doesn’t need to be huge, it’s a viable option. Almost any SSD will outperform a spinner when put side-by-side and measured for data transfer speeds, and this is why even smaller SSDs can cost a lot more per GB than spinner drives.
As an example, let’s take one of the smallest SSD sizes at the moment, which is 16GB. A casual browse online and on popular sites like Amazon will reveal many deals for such capacity SSD drives for around £20. That’s not much, you’re likely thinking and you’re right. However, compare this to one of the cheapest spinners we found, which was an 80GB Western Digital model that cost just £5.00 and you can see the clear difference. For the £5.00 you get a whole lot more storage and a drive from a wellknown and highly thought of manufacturer. For the SSD you get substantially less storage, and often you’ll find these models from from manufacturers you’ve likely not heard of before.
Prices climb steadily in terms of storage for SSD, and by stepping up the standard storage size brackets you’ll gradually add to the cost. The 16-32GB size range will set you back around £18-20, the 32-60GB range will go for around £20-30, and jumping to 240GB will ramp the cost up to around £60-70. Opting for larger, and more useful sizes like 500GB will likely need a payout of around £100-120 for the lower end models, with the bigger, higher quality models costing more. At the top end of the scale, 1-2TB models can go for the low end of around £200, to the ridiculous sum of around £1,800 for the high end. How much does the average 2TB spinner cost? About £50. Yes, the price difference is very real.
In fact, for a comparative steal of around £200 you can get a 6TB HDD like the Seagate NAS. That’s a massive amount of storage, more than most household users will ever need, and for that same amount of SSD space, you’d likely have to pay, wait for it, around £5,500, give or take.
The Price Isn’t All That’s Right
Of course, there’s much more to consider than price and overall speed. SSD is more expensive and faster than magnetic HDD tech, but what else makes is viable, even in the form of cheaper models?
Well, the lack of moving parts thanks to the use of NAND memory means SSD uses less power, with an average of 2-3 watts over HDD averages of 6-7 watts. No moving parts means silent running with no vibrations, less heat generation and a more physically durable construction not as prone to shock or dust. SSDs are also unaffected by magnetism. An area where SSDs also greatly improve over HDDs is boot times. Systems with an OS loaded onto an SSD often boot much faster than HDD systems, and you can get to your desktop in seconds.
This leaves HDD tech with the only clear benefits being price and capacity. As SSD price drops, however, this benefit will become less relevant, so even a cheaper SSD will be the better option.
Mister Maker
As with any technology sale, a major concern should always be the manufacturer of the device. In a perfect world all devices would be made with equal quality, but that isn’t the case in practice. Some hardware producers just aren’t as capable as others, and there’s a wide range of manufacturing quality out there. Some names are renowned for quality, while some are known more for a focus on affordability over quality. Then there are those that simply produce poor quality products, regardless of price.
SSDs are no exception, and you could even argue that the gulf between quality and price is even more relevant here. Cheap SSDs have been found to be both defective and far slower than more expensive models, and benchmark tests have revealed quite a difference in terms of performance.
The likes of OCZ (Toshiba), Sandisk and Kingston are often favoured makes of SSD, and all companies offer models that provide good performance that often doesn’t cost the Earth to acquire. Then there are makes that are not so reputable. There are many cheaper, almost unknown makes you’ll stumble upon online that utilise low-quality memory chips and parts to produce very cheap SSDs. These often don’t deliver the same level of performance as the alternatives, and although as we said earlier, even these cheaper models often outperform even expensive HDDs, their reliability can suffer, as can the build quality.
Of major concern here is the controller. This is the brain of the SSD that controls the memory, dealing with such things as reading and writing data, error correction, caching and much more. This is arguably the aspect of the SSD that suffers the most in poor quality or cheaper models. The best SSDs that win awards and break speed benchmarks often have highquality controller chips, and this can be where some of the higher price ends up. Good controllers also end up granting higher read and write speeds, so even at the most basic level, ignoring other behind the scenes tasks, they have a noticeable impact.
HDD Or Cheap SSD?
So should you take a risk and go for one of the many cheaper SSDs on the market or should you hold off and save for a more expensive model? Ideally, the latter is the better option, as cheaper SSDs, although often faster than HDD units, usually won’t offer the best representation of SSD ability. If you can find a cheaper SSD from a good manufacturer, however, and it has enough space for your needs, go for it. You may be limited in storage compared to larger HDD options, but the increase in speed offered will usually outweigh any space restrictions.
What Is An SSD?
Although most of our readers will already be familiar with SSD, we’re aware that not all users will know what SSD is and how it differs from older HDDs. In case you’re reading this and starching your head, here’s the basic rundown.
Since the 1950s when the first hard disk drive (HDD) was created, computer storage technology hadn’t changed much. Hard disks became larger in capacity and with faster data transfer speeds, sure, but the core technology always revolved around, if you’ll excuse the pun, spinning magnetic discs to store data. There was only so far the technology could be pushed, until nonvolatile memory was created.
You’ll no doubt be familiar with RAM, the volatile memory of your system. It’s volatile nature means any data contained in the memory is lost when power is turned off. Non-volatile memory works similarly to RAM, but the contents are not lost when power is switched off. Basically, it has all the benefits of speed and efficiency of RAM, but without worries about data loss during downtime.
Retooled into larger capacity volumes, SSDs using nonvolatile NAND memory surfaced, finally giving PC users an alternative to the ageing magnetic HDD. SSDs, due to their make-up of memory chips feature no moving parts and are faster and more efficient than HDDs, and generally superior in most ways.
SSDs And Flash
Solid-state drives are often confused with flash drives, and many wonder exactly what the difference is between the USB thumb drives we’ve been using for years, and the relatively new SSD tech. The answer is simple – not much.
Essentially, the two kinds of storage are identical, and both use solid-state memory to store data, and both are non-volatile. They’re also both very fast, with USB sticks having the limitation of USB connections instead of internal, often faster SATA and NVMe.
If this is the case, you may be wondering why you can get a 512GB or even 1TB USB flash drive for far less than an equivalent SSD. That’s a good question, with the answer simply being one of quality. Most of the time the memory used in USB flash drives is of far lower quality than that used in a standard SSD. SSDs are also faster and more efficient due to their superior architecture, internal connectivity, and the controller that handles all of the work is often superior too. Simply put, SSDs are much better at their job than USB sticks and are designed for large scale storage and data handling, whereas USB drives are meant for smaller tasks and simple data portability.
SATA Vs NVMe
There are currently two major players in the SSD market in terms of connectivity – SATA and NVMe. SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is the older, more common connection of the two and has come in various revisions, with the latest and fastest being SATA3.
SATA is a very fast drive interface, but it does have a ceiling that limits its maximum transfer speeds. This is around 600Gbps. This means that almost all SATA SSDs easily pass benchmark tests, coming in with around the same performance scores. This effectively held back SSD, preventing the true performance of the technology. A new solution was needed.
The more recent interface of NWMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) has no such problem and is just the solution. It’s been hailed as the future of SSD interfaces by critics. In fact, you could say it was designed for the storage technology to blossom. Like High performance GPUs, NVMe is a card-based storage that connects to the motherboard via PCIe slot. This facilitates much higher speeds and more efficient data handling.
NVMe’s growth was slow to begin with, and after its formation in 2011, it took a while for software and hardware companies to get behind it, but a head of steam has picked up and the tech still continues to evolve.
NVMe drives can be found in both PCIe card and 2.5” drive formats. Of course, NVMe models are almost always more expensive than an equivalently sized SATA SSD model, so if you plan to try this tech out, be sure you have the extra cash to spare.
Common Jargon
Here are some of the most commonly used terms and their descriptions.
SSD
Sold state drive. This is the chip-based storage medium that is set to supercooled the older magnetic hard disk technology.
HDD
Hard disk drive. A magnetic storage medium that’s just over 60 years old. It’s still the most popular method of storing data, but has become limited in application.
EEPROM
Electrically erasable programmable read-only memory. This is breed of memory Toshiba initially developed the first flash memory from in the early 1980s.
NAND and NOR
Types of memory names after types of logic gates in electronics. NAND is the kind of memory used in most flash drives and SSDs.
SSD Endurance
This is the term used to describe the overall lifetime of an SSD unit. SSDs have a finite mount of rewrites to their memory cells before failure. Two main terms are used when talking about this, both of which basically measure the same thing, but are used interchangeably by different manufacturers They are:
TBW (TerraBytes Written)
TBW is simply the total amount of data that can be written to an SSD before failure occurs. Once the TBW is reached, drive will likely start to encounter errors and problems during operation.
DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day)
This is a more confusing method of determining the lifetime of an SSD that gives you a lifetime measured in years instead of data totals. It measures the amount of capacity overwrites you can make to the drive per each day of its usable life prior to the end of the warranty.
SATA
Serial AT Interface. This is the older drive interface used by SSDs and most HDD units. It’s fast, but has hit a wall, leading to the creation of new interfaces.
NVMe
Non-Volatile Memory Express. This is the more recent drive interface used by SSDs that utilises a motherboard’s PCIe slot to connect. It grants superior speeds and is set to pave the way for even faster storage.