What should be the choice of solid-state and mechanical hard drives?

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Solid state drives have developed rapidly in recent years, with a posture to replace mechanical hard drives. Although the solid state hard drive in this two-year price drop a lot, but still can not compare with the mechanical hard disk, capacity is not an order of magnitude. How can we balance speed, capacity, and price in a limited budget when we are saving? Please follow the author today to find out the content of this matter.

First of all, in terms of appearance, the mechanical hard disk than the solid state hard drive a lot, the weight is also relatively heavy. In addition, mechanical hard disk in the use of a long time there will be noise, solid-state hard disk is more muted. Solid-State hard disk read and write faster, not afraid of vibration, mechanical hard drive the most afraid of vibration, so many notebook computer hard disk comparison capacity is bad.

　　Mechanical hard Drive

Hard disk Structure: Single disc, Multi disc

Western data of mechanical hard disk products are: Lan Pan, Hongpan, black plate, green plate four kinds of products

(1) Hongpan: West number of new hard drives for the NAS market, for home or small business NAS users with 1 to 5 hard drive bits. The performance characteristics are close to the green disk, low power consumption, less noise, can adapt to long continuous work, have the characteristic technology nasware, this technology makes it better compatibility, whether it is for NAS or RAID can have outstanding compatibility performance.

(2) Black Disk: High performance, large cache, fast. Code: LS WD Caviar Black. Mainly applicable to enterprises, High-volume servers, high-performance computing applications, such as multimedia video and photo editing, high-performance game consoles.

(3) Lan Pan: Ordinary hard disk, suitable for home. The advantages are strong performance, low price, high performance ratio; The disadvantage is that the sound is slightly louder than the green disk, and the performance is slightly worse than the black disk.

(4) Green disk: SATA hard disk, heat lower, more quiet, more environmentally friendly. Energy-saving disk, suitable for large capacity storage, using intellipower technology, rotational speed of 5400 rpm. The advantage is quiet, low price, disadvantage is poor performance, high latency, short life.

　　Main parameters of mechanical hard disk:

(1) disk capacity of a single disc

Although the capacity of the hard disk increases sharply, but I feel very few users pay attention to the disk capacity and the hard disk is a few dishes, in fact, this parameter directly determines the performance of the hard disk. Single disc capacity refers to the capacity of a hard disk, because a hard disk usually has a number of discs, single disc capacity on the size of the hard disk has a crucial impact, and the single disc capacity directly determines the continuous data transmission rate of the hard disk.

(2) Hard disk speed

Because the hard disk is the slowest part of the computer storage system, memory and CPU are waiting for the hard drive to operate. There is no doubt that if the speed of the hard drive increases, then the system performance will be a small increase. But increasing the speed will increase the product heat, while the noise will multiply, so 7200 turn to now is still the absolute mainstream hard drive.

(3) hard drive seek time

In fact, seek time is the average time the head reaches the track where the target data is located. This time, along with the average head latency time, determines when the hard disk head finds the data. This time directly affects the random data transmission speed of the hard disk.

(4) Determine other aspects of the performance of the hard disk

The hard disk performance is also determined by the hard disk cache, interface rate, and interface type. The mainstream 1TB single disk HDD cache reached 64M.

The current mechanical hard disk mainstream capacity for 1-2TB, mechanical hard disk production process is extremely complex, the world only a few manufacturers can produce mechanical hard disk.

　　How to choose Solid State Drive

Let's take a look at the parameters of the solid-state drives:

Flash particle

Flash memory particles are divided into SLC, MLC, TLC Three, SLC's best performance at the same time life is the longest, but the price is the most expensive. The performance of these three is closely related to the complexity of storing voltage signals. The voltage combination of TLC is composed of 3-bit binary, that is, 2 of the 3-side, a total of 8 combinations, and the MLC voltage combination is composed of 2-bit 2, that is, 2 of 2 times a total of 4 combinations, which is not difficult to see because TLC requires more accurate control voltage, then write the data of course it will take more time; Similarly, because 8 signals need to be identified, and MLC only need to identify 4, TLC spends more time reading the data. But compared with SLC, the MLC was blown out because SLC's voltage portfolio was only 1 and 2, compared with MLC's 4 voltage combinations, SLC takes less time to identify the signal and lower the voltage control requirements: Power is 1 and power is 0, which explains the best performance of SLC.

Main control

The main control chip is the brain of solid-state hard disk, its role is to reasonably allocate data on each flash chip load, the second is to assume the entire data relay, connect the flash chip and external SATA interface. The ability of different main control is very big, in the data processing ability, the algorithm, to the flash memory chip read Write control will have very big difference, directly can lead to the solid state hard disk product in the performance difference up to dozens of times times. The main control of the current mainstream are: Intel main control, Andforce main control, Marvell Control, Samsung master control and so on.

Interface

The interface is divided into SATA, mSATA, m.2, u.2, Pci-e. At present, the mainstream solid-state drives are used SATA interface, the flagship solid-state hard disk will be used m.2, u.2, Pci-e. PCIE-E direct communication with the CPU, the speed can reach a staggering 2gb/s.

　　Summarize:

In the Save machine, high-definition film enthusiasts, large stand-alone game enthusiasts, should choose a large capacity of the mechanical hard disk. In order to better experience can be dual hard drive, solid-state hard disk as a system disk, the most commonly used software and games on the solid state Drive, information photos, etc. on the mechanical hard drive. Important data stored in the mechanical hard disk is also more secure, although the solid state hard disk failure rate is very low, but it happened to us that is the absolute, precious photos, file data that is the daughter does not change, in the event of accidents, mechanical hard disk recovery data is also relatively easy.

If you are just day-to-day office, watching movies, playing some mainstream games, then 128/256GB solid state hard disk is enough, in the choice of solid-state hard drive, should try to buy some big manufacturers brand, in addition to speed, stability is also very important.