In recent times, the use of new storage units as an alternative to hard drives has become widespread: these are SSD disks or solid state drives.
Unlike conventional hard drives, SSDs lack moving components, such as magnetic platters, read heads or motors. The only element that SSDs usually have in common with conventional drives is the electronic controller and also, in most cases, a connection interface such as SATA.
SSD drives are based on flash memory technology. USB flash drives and SD cards also work with this technology, storage devices that are already part of our daily lives.
How are SSD Drives Superior To Conventional Hard Drives?
It can be said that the main advantage of SOLID STATE DRIVE data recovery over conventional hard drives is their response speed.
Conventional drives take a considerable amount of time to start up. When starting, the motor must begin to rotate to move the plates until the optimal speed is reached; the reading heads must leave their parking area and move until they are positioned correctly. Then, for each read or write operation, the heads must wait for the platters to rotate and position them in the appropriate sector.
However, in an SSD disk, since it works exclusively with flash memory, reading or writing data is much faster. The time it takes for the drive to activate and be ready to work, almost instantly, is also much shorter.
Pros and Cons of SSD Drives
There is no doubt then that SSDs have much better performance, and that without a doubt, in the not too distant future, they will gradually replace conventional hard drives in much of our computer equipment.
But not all are advantages with this type of device, with price and capacity being its main disadvantages. An SSD is significantly more expensive than a conventional disk of the same capacity. Furthermore, the maximum capacity that we can find on the market today for SSDs is much lower than that available in conventional drives.
It should also be mentioned that certain SSD drives are known to suffer from defects in their firmware or 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 “clean” (permanently erase) the free space that remains unused in the file system. This has serious implications if files or folders are accidentally deleted, or if they disappear due to a logical error. In those cases, we run a high risk that the disk will delete any remnants of the deleted or lost files, causing them to be irreparably lost.
What To Do In Case Of Data Loss
If you know that your computer uses an SSD and you encounter a file loss or accidental deletion situation, we recommend that you immediately shut down your computer and put your SSD in the hands of professionals to perform data recovery.
If the computer remains on – whether because you are working with it, or because you are trying to recover the data at home –, for every minute that passes, more information will be irrevocably erased by the device itself, making it impossible to recover data the data even by professionals.
This feature of SSD disks can be considered a good security measure for those who want their deleted or old information not to be recovered by anyone, but it can also represent a big problem in case of information loss by accident.
We end by remembering, as always, that the best prevention is to have one or more backup copies, updated and verified, so as not to find ourselves in the need to request data recovery.
