Which drive is the right drive?

Picking the best storage option to upgrade your laptop PC’s performance isn’t as simple as it appears. Do you need a traditional HDD, a solid state drive SDD, or a solid state hybrid drive SSHD ? There are a number of important factors to consider, and none of the available solutions always provides the best performance in each category. As with most important decisions, you have to choose the option that can best meet your unique needs.

Let’s break this  down to 4 criteria so you can decide which drive is right for you.

Capacity

Traditional hard drives are the workhorses when it comes to sheer capacity and how much data can be stored. SSHD technology also offers maximum capacity points at affordable price points and SSDs are only affordable at lower capacities but have very fast read/write times.

Speed

SSDs provide peak performance for booting and high read/write performance to supporting computing that requires enhanced multitasking capabilities. On the other hand, an SSHD can provide near SSD performance for booting, launching, and loading data. HDDs usually provide ample performance for the majority of PC platforms shipping today.

Price

Measuring price per gigabyte you will get your most bang for the buck with traditional HDD’s. These drives estimated currently provide you 1TB of space for approx $70.00 at this time of writing while you can purchase a 240GB SSD for the same price. SSHDs provide a cost per gigabyte that’s just slightly higher than HDDs.

Durability

SSDs are viewed as more durable simply because of their solid state design. Without moving parts, they can withstand higher extremes of shock, drop, and temperature. Traditional HDD’s still have moving parts that are subject to wear over long periods of time and will eventually fail.

Summary

Thinking through all of these criteria may make upgrading laptop storage seem like a tough decision. But perhaps it all comes down to cost-effectiveness: How can you get maximum capacity that’s nearly as fast as solid state but fits your wallet better?

Take a closer look at solid state hybrid drives. They most likely can provide the best combination of performance characteristics to meet your needs.