Faster access. A traditional hard drive needs to be spinning at a certain speed to work. This takes some time from a ‘standing start’. It also needs the head (the device used to write and read information) to move to the exact physical location on the disk where the relevant data is stored. An SSD doesn’t have either of these requirements and thus works much more quickly – even though the difference is a fraction of a second each time, it soon mounts up.
More resilient. Because an SSD has no moving parts, it’s much sturdier and can cope with wider extremes in temperature or knocks and bumps.
Quieter. Aside from cooling fans in the notebook or PC, an SSD is completely silent. This is different to traditional hard drives where you can often hear the drive working (particularly when it is on the verge of failing).
Fewer fragmentation problems. Unlike traditional hard drives which often suffer from defragmentation (where files are physically scattered across the disk, making them slower to access), it makes little difference where files are located on an SSD.
Size. Existing SSDs are sometimes smaller and lighter than the equivalent hard drives, though at the moment this advantage disappears with higher-capacity drives.
