Earlier, when we did not have much of a choice, PC storage options were limited to the largest capacity hard disk drive one could afford. Those days are long gone and today the average customer has to juggle between selecting different types of storage media apart from their capacity. Although it is fairly important to select the most optimum storage medium for a specific application, each of the drive types has their own advantages and disadvantages.

Magnetic hard disk drives have long been the default storage component for both desktop and laptop computers. Although the latest magnetic drives are very much advanced and better performing compared to their brethren from yesteryears, their underlying technology has remained mostly unchanged. Magnetic hard drives essentially consist of stiff magnetic platters rotating at high speeds paired with read/write heads travelling over their surface to retrieve or record data.

Magnetic hard disk drive technology is mature. Manufacturers now make highly reliable drives that users can purchase at much lower prices as compared with other storage options – most magnetic hard drives cost only a few cents per gigabyte. Moreover, they are available in relatively high capacities, going up to 4TB. Modern magnetic hard drives connect via the SATA or Serial ATA interface and do not require any special software for the operating system to recognize them. In short, magnetic hard disk drives are dirt-cheap, simple to operate and spacious.

However, the disadvantage with magnetic hard disk drives is their low storage or retrieval speeds compared to the SSDs and Hybrid products. The read and write speed depends on how fast the platter rotates – a 7200-RPM drive is faster than a 5400-RPM drive, but both are significantly slower than SSDs or even hybrid drives.

If you are just an average PC user sticking mostly to using mail, browsing the Web, and some amount of document editing, a standard magnetic hard disk drive should serve you fine.

SSDs or Solid State Drives are so called because unlike the magnetic drives, they do not have any moving parts – they are typically nonvolatile NAND flash memory. Although most SSDs connect via the SATA interface, there are PCI Express-based SSDs that offer ultrahigh-performances. SSDs store data and file just as any other drive does.

Since SSDs do not have any moving parts, they can operate at blazing speeds such as 500MB per second on average accessing data in just a few milliseconds. Compare this with the speed of a magnetic hard disk – 200MBps with access times just a shade below 8ms. In short, with SSDs you have a much snappier and a much more responsive system. With SSDs, everything is faster – boot times, application launch times and file-transfer speeds.

Without moving parts, SSDs are not susceptible to damage or degradation due to movement or vibrations. The two disadvantages with SSDs are their cost per gigabyte and their read/write life. At present, they cost about $1 per gigabyte.

Manufacturers offer Hybrid drives as a go-between. These are mostly magnetic hard drives with some SSD thrown in. The most frequently accessed data is stored in the SSD. That makes for high speed while the cost is kept low.