SSD or HDD? Which is better for you?

Image source: https://www.avoiderrors.com/ssd-vs-hdd/

By Tony Wen

Solid state drive(SSD) has been quickly showing up on most branded laptops and workstations. Some take it for sure that SSD would eventually replace traditional hard disk while some are sceptical about the newer, much more expensive media given its short appearance in the PC history. Why do we have to pay hundreds of dollars more instead of a lower-priced-yet-equally-high-quality hard disk?

Not exactly.

Before I further elaborate on my stand, let’s look at the known fact of SSD vs HDD:

“ Like a memory stick/USB flash storage, there are no moving parts to an  SSD . Rather, information is stored in microchips. Conversely, a  hard disk  drive uses a mechanical arm with a read/write head to move around and read information from the right location on a storage platter. This difference is what makes  SSD  so much faster since there are no mechanical moving parts in the  SSD drive. 

The price difference is over 4 times  more  for a 1TB  SSD  compared to a 1TB standard  HDD . ” (Storagereview.com, 2018)
Yes, SSD is a lot faster and more expensive. It is simply better. With no mechanical moving parts, it is also a lot less likely to have physical damage that could cause to a hard disk under transportation or magnetic interference, which eventually corrupts your operational system and makes your files and data unreadable. Not to mention to pay a premium to get your IT support to the fire scene. For POS terminal. You don’t want to have a corrupted OS even your data may be sitting on the cloud. That is also why some people move away from traditional POS and choose a tablet, which has its own set of PITB to worry about (which we would openly discuss in another thread). To us the solution is simple, go for SSD on your windows POS.

How can we make it equally affordable without passing the price increase to our merchants? How can our customers enjoy all the benefits what SSD has to offer? We examine carefully how much storage space we need and then go for a smaller capacity SSD. Currently, all MegaPOS systems are deployed with SSD.

We believe hard disk will still be relevant, as long as the price stays competitive, and the market needs its ever-growing storage size. When we are dealing with business machines like POS system, be it for a cafe, a restaurant, a retail shop or a hair salon. We need something solid and practical. Most data should be on cloud for ready access, so we only require the local POS to function with minimum local dependency day after day like, pretty much day one. And yes, without the battery failing for every 6 months.

FYI. How to tell what type of storage you have?

Windows Drive Optimizer (formerly called Disk Defragmenter) reports whether a drive is  HDD  or  SSD . You can access this utility by pressing the Windows key, searching for optimize, and selecting Defragment and optimize your drives. (This will generally work in any system where the disks are not plugged into a RAID card.)

Reference:

Storagereview.com. (2018). SSD vs HDD | StorageReview.com – Storage Reviews. [online] Available at: https://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd [Accessed 14 Sep. 2018].