'Should I choose an MP3-player with a hard drive or with a flash drive?'

When buying a new MP3-player you sure will come across a lot of devices with all different specifications. Besides the differences in color and capacity, you will probably notice that there’s also a difference between several drives. Some MP3-players (like Apple iPod Classic) contain a hard-drive, whereas others (like the SanDisk Sansa Fuze or the Apple iPod Touch or Nano) contain a flash drive. But what’s the difference between these drives and which one should you choose?

There are a lot of differences between a flash and a hard drive, but first of all you will notice it in reference to capacity: hard drive have a much bigger capacity than flash drives, but ofcourse, flash drives tend to get more and more capacity as technology advances.

A hard drive contains a disc which leads to a bigger MP3 player, whereas flash drives can be very small (for example: take a look at the iPod Shuffle). Logically, a hard drive contains moving parts which uses much more battery life in comparison to the solid state flash drive. Flash drives do therefore use much less battery, and, more importantly, when dropping it, the chance that it has survived it is much higher than when dropping a hard drive. Besides that it can absorb shocks much better , so it’s more suitable for use during work-out.

Whether you should buy a hard-drive based or a flash-drive based mp3-player depends on your preferences. When you have a huge music collection which you want to take everywhere with you, you don’t want a mp3-player with flash drive because it probably can’t store all of your songs. If you work-out or run a lot or travel a lot, and you want to take your music with you, a flash-drive based mp3-player is probably more suitable for you since it’s more shock-absorbing, smaller, lighter and has a longer battery life.