What is a SSD?

 

A SSD is short for Solid State Drive. It is a storage device for your PC or Laptop, it holds Windows / Mac OS, your pics, documents, music, video, etc.  SSD’s are designed to supersede the traditional hard drive (storage) in a computer, they have no moving parts and instead are based on flash memory technology (the same technology that’s in your USB memory stick, camera memory card, or mobile phone). They are however incredibly fast when compared to normal hard drive, use less energy and are highly shock resistant. They are a highly recommended upgrade for you PC and laptop, making a HUGE difference to the performance of your PC.

 

Why should you install a SSD in your new PC?

 

When building a new desktop computer system, I highly recommend the customer selects an SSD drive as an option…. here are some reasons why…

 

Pros:

 

• Incredible overall speed and boot up (start-up) performance

• Uses less energy

• Has no moving parts, so theoretically should be more reliable 

• Highly shock resistant (good for your laptop / ultrabook) when on the move.

• Can use the same type of SATA connector as a traditional HDD.

 

Cons:

 

More expensive per Gigabyte (GB) vs traditional Hard Disk Drive.

 

SATA SSD’s:

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SATA (itself a replacement for IDE) is an interface for connecting (primarily) hard drives, optical drives, and SSD’s. You may be familiar with SATA as it has been around for a while now, and is very common with its AHCI protocol (Advanced Host Controller Interface). Even though SSD’s and N.V.M.E are now on the block, SATA is still going strong and is used commonly for connecting up traditional hard drives, optical drives, and SATA based SSD’s. The max speed for a SATA based SSD is around 500-550mb/s.

 

N.V.M.E (Non-Volatile Memory Express)

 

N.V.M.E is the next generation protocol design specially with SSD technology in mind. It is designed to supersede ACHI SATA based SSD’s, provide superior performance and management of your SSD. 

 

N.V.M.E based SSD’s connect through your motherboard’s PCIe (PCI Express) bus, normally via a small card interface called M.2. These M.2 slots are available on the latest generations of motherboard and provide incredible SSD performance, with sequential reads of above 7000mb/s possible, and 5000mb/s writes on some latest gen 4 drives.

 

PCI-E SSD’s

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PCI-E or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, provides high speed connections via PCI-E slots (1x,4x,8x,16x) or M.2 interfaces. You may commonly hear the term “lanes” when reading about PCI-E. Usually in the case of an N.V.M.E SSD they may use 4x lanes each. PCI-E SSD’s, in combination with the new N.V.M.E protocol provide blazing fast performance, booting systems in under 10 seconds and opening app’s near instantly.

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At PC Guy we would highly recommend upgrading to a Solid State Drive to help improve your system performance. If you would like any more information please get in touch.