▷ External ssd pros and cons versus hard drives

Over the last few years we have seen the arrival of a multitude of external SSD storage devices on the market. This fact, together with the decrease in prices of NAND memory and therefore of SSDs, makes many users consider leaving their external HDD aside in favor of a modern SSD.

In this article we talk about the main pros and cons of an external SSD versus an external HDD. Which one will win? Will the SSD for storage be worth the extra cost?

Index of contents

Advantages and disadvantages of external SSDs

Like everything in life, nothing is perfect, in the Internet world there is a lot of talk about the virtues of external SSDs, but it is not fair to say that they do not have their disadvantages compared to traditional magnetic hard drives. Below we summarize the main pros and cons of an external SSD versus an external HDD.

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Advantage

• Speed: Both transfer and access are far superior to HDDs, even if we were considering RAID. New drivers offer transfer speeds approximately 10 times faster than the best hard drives available, USB-based solutions are 4-5 times faster in transfer, while either solution has approximately 100 times less downtimes data access Reliability: A lot is said about SSDs that have an established life expectancy, but this is not enough to write operations. Even if the controller decided that a memory cell has reached its life expectancy, it will not allow you to write to it, but it will be able to recover the data. Real-life stress tests showed that the nominal failure time set by most SSD manufacturers is much shorter than what drives can achieve. The average consumer won't even come close to exhausting the average lifespan of an SSD for a decade or more. Hard drives that do that are a rare exception. Implementation cost: The great speed advantages allow you to install programs and operating systems in much shorter times than doing the same with large hard drives. Even if you are unlucky and an SSD fails, you can still replace and redeploy it much faster than you would a HDD of similar capacity. Consumption: lower power consumption than hard drives, something especially relevant for notebooks. Silence: there is no noise as there are moving mechanical parts.

Disadvantages

• The price per GB is considerably higher than that of hard drives. Available Capabilities - Even high-capacity SSDs can't compete with HDDs when you need large amounts of stored data. Some of the early models were not very reliable from a controller / firmware perspective, but in the last 2-3 years, most of the problems seem to have been fixed.

As we can see, the external SSDs have many advantages, something that together with the decrease in the price of these units, makes them more recommendable than ever. If you need to be able to move large amounts of data from one device to another on a regular basis, an external SSD will be the perfect solution for you, as it will save you a lot of time, and time is money today.

Many people think that data can be recovered from an HDD very easily in case of failure. This is something that is possible in some cases, but in many others it is not possible. It is true that in the event of an SSD failure we will not be able to recover the data in any way, but most users will not recover it in the event of a physical HDD failure. If you have a lot of critical data, regular backup will be your best guarantee when you can recover data from a damaged HDD or SSD. With the prices of current SSDs, it is not so complicated to be able to make backup copies of them, especially in the case of documents and photos, files that do not usually occupy many tens of GB.

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