With mini laptops and netbooks you often have to choose between a regular hard drive (HDD) or a solid state drive (SSD). So,  which alternative is better and why? In this article we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of these vastly different storage devices.

No Moving Parts

Almost everyone is familiar with the old-fashioned, conventional hard drive. It has been one of the main ingredients in computers for decades. Solid state drives, however, are a relatively new phenomenon; SSDs are not based on spinning platters or any other moving parts for that matter. Instead they use Flash memory similar to that used in thumb drives. Besides making it completely silent, this increases the durability of the storage device. Normally a hard drive is one of the most fragile components in a laptop and often the first one to break. With an SSD this is less of an issue.

On the other hand, a solid state drive won’t last forever either. An SSD can only be written, erased and rewritten a finite number of times and eventually it will wear out. This can be avoided to some extent by always writing to different parts of the drive so that it lasts longer. But on other words you shouldn’t stop making backups just because you have an SSD.

Roomy Hard Drive or Cramped SSD

One of the major trade-offs (so far) with SSDs is that they are a lot more expensive to manufacture than regular hard drives, and for that reason you’ll get a lot less storage for the money. To even out the huge difference in cost per GB, SSDs usually come in much smaller sizes. Actually it’s not even possible yet to make solid state drives with the same amount of storage space as hard drives.

Eventually this will all even out and most likely SSDs will surpass hard drives in both size and cost per GB, but for now the difference in pricing is very noticeable.

Netbook SSDs are Slower

Nowadays there are lots of solid state drives on the market with incredible performance. A (more expensive) SSD is often as much as five times faster than a hard drive, and as the technology matures it will get even faster than that. Naturally such a fast drive will have speed up your computer considerably – applications will load faster and the system will boot in less time.

Unfortunately this isn’t entirely true for netbooks and mini laptop computers. Typically, these small and inexpensive laptops also come with cheaper and slower SSDs. In some cases you won’t notice much of an improvement in loading times, and it might even be slower in some situations, especially when writing or moving lots of smaller files on the drive.

Low Power Consumption?

Another advantage of solid state drives is the lower power draw, or at least it’s an advantage that SSD manufacturers are eager to point out. But actually the difference isn’t that large – modern hard drives are very power efficient, and when you include all of the laptop’s components in the calculations, there won’t be any huge savings in battery life if you choose an SSD over a hard drive.

Netbook SSD vs. Hard Drive Pros and Cons

Although SSDs have a lot of obvious advantages, hard drives will still win out for most user groups, especially when netbooks are concerned. You simply get so much more storage space for the money with a regular hard drive, and in mini-notebooks SSDs rarely have a performance advantage either.

However, if you don’t use the netbook as your primary computer and don’t need to use it for storage, an SSD could still be the best option. For tech enthusiasts, there’s also the important factor of using new technology and let’s face it – hard drives are ancient by computer tech standards.

Related posts:

1. Asus Eee PC 1000HE Vs 1000H Side-by-Side Comparison