In recent times, the use of new storage units has become widespread as an alternative to hard drives: these are SSDs or solid state drives.
Unlike conventional hard drives, SSDs lack mobile components, such as magnetic plates, reader heads or motor. The only element that SSDs usually have in common with conventional disks is the electronic controller and also, in most cases, a connection interface such as SATA.
The SSD units are based on flash memory technology. This technology also works with USB memories and SD cards, storage devices that are already part of our daily lives.
What are the advantages of SSDs over conventional hard drives?
It can be said that the main advantage of SSDs over conventional hard drives is their speed of response.
Conventional discs need to invest a considerable amount of time in getting started. When starting, the motor must start to turn to move the plates until reaching the optimum speed; the reading heads must leave their parking area and move to position correctly. Then, for each reading or writing operation, the heads must wait for the rotation of the plates and position themselves in the appropriate sector.
However, on an SSD, when working exclusively with flash memories, reading or writing data is much faster. It is also much shorter the time it takes the disk to activate and be ready to work, almost instantaneously.
Pros and cons of SSD drives
There is no doubt that the SSD have a much better performance, and that undoubtedly, in the not too distant future, they will be replacing the conventional hard drive recovery little by little in a large part of our computer equipment.
But not all are advantages with this type of devices, price and capacity being its main disadvantages. An SSD is much more expensive than a conventional disk of the same capacity. In addition, the maximum capacity that we can find today in the market for the SSD, is much lower than that available in conventional disks.
It should also be mentioned that certain SSDs are known to suffer from defects in their firmware or in their controllers; these failures can leave the disk unusable and cause us to lose access to our data.
On the other hand, most SSD models are programmed to go “cleaning” (permanently deleting) the free space left unused in the file system. This has serious implications if there is an accidental deletion of files or folders, or the disappearance of them due to a logical error. In those cases, we run a high risk of the disk eliminating any remaining files deleted or lost, causing loss irremediably.
What to do in case of data loss
If you know that your computer uses an SSD and you encounter a situation of file loss or accidental deletion, we recommend that you immediately turn off your computer and put your SSD in the hands of professionals to perform a data recovery.
If the computer is still on-whether it’s working with it or trying to recover the data-for every minute that passes, more information will be irretrievably erased by the device itself, making it impossible to recover from it. The data even by professionals.
This particularity of the SSD disks can be considered a good security measure by those who wish that their deleted or old information cannot be recovered by anyone, but it can also represent a big problem in case of loss of information by accident.
We end up remembering, as always, that the best prevention is to have one or several security copies, updated and checked, so as not to be in the need to request a data recovery.
