Choosing Data Storage Systems

Choosing data storage systems is more complicated than it used to be. Whereas your choices used to be limited to tape drives and hard disk drives, today’s options are plentiful. Some of the most common data storage systems today include:

• Traditional hard disk drives (HDDs)
• Solid state drives (SSDs)
• Solid state hybrid drives

Image Credit: Arkadiusz

HDDs have been around for decades, and they’re both reliable and cheap. While HDDs have proven themselves time and time again, they’ve pretty much reached their limit as far as performance goes. After all, a disk can only spin so fast. Thus, performance is limited.
SSDs are fairly new to the storage arena. Unlike HDDs, SSDs do not have moving parts.

Therefore, performance is not limited by mechanics. The problem with solid state drives is that they’re expensive. On a per gigabyte basis, SSDs cost dramatically more than HDDs. While you may not think twice about buying an 8GB thumb drive, you’ll definitely pause when presented with a quote for 5 terabytes of SSD storage.

Solid state hybrid drives are data storage systems that blend HDDs and SSDs. With a solid state hybrid drive, you get the performance of an SSD and the storage capacity of an HDD at an affordable price. The SSD portion of the solid state hybrid drive is dedicated to storing commonly accessed data while the HDD part stores the remaining data. Since your most commonly used data is on SSD, performance is amazingly fast whenever you need to access that data.

Meanwhile, should you need to call up data stored on the HDD portion of the data storage system, it will arrive just as you’d expect it to from a traditional hard disk. Though slower, you’ll be able to call up and work with this data as needed.

With three data storage systems available, you have a choice between capacity, performance, and price. By choosing a solid state hybrid drive, you don’t necessarily have to sacrifice one for another.