What is a SSD?
An SSD is a newer generation of storage device which doesn’t have any moving parts like your traditional hard drives, It’s made up of flash nand chips and are usually much faster than hard drives. It comes in various form factors and sizes, but what made it different from hard drives it’s read/write speed and are more durable.
Why You should upgrade to one
- It’s faster and make your laptop/desktop snappier.
- Your boot times will improve significantly.
- Games will load much faster
- SSDs are more rugged so it can take drops and shocks
- SSDs are lightweight
- You don’t have to defragment them (They’ve required trimming)
Type of SSDs
mSATA III, SATA III, and traditional SSDs
These type of SSD look like the traditional hard drives and can be used as a replacement for you old hard drives. Since, it used SATA(Serial ATA) interface they are only restricted to 6 GBit/s or about 600 MB per second. These can be a good option for old systems.
PCIe and NVMe SSDs
These are newest generation of SSDs and come in small form factors. Since they are connected through PCIe lanes it can go up to 6000MB/s. Newer devices already comes with an additional slot for SSD upgrade, you can check your manufacturer website to check whether your device support NVMe SSDs or not.
Cons of SSDs
- SSDs are more expensive than HDDs due to which it can’t be your media storage drives and NAS
- Consumer SSDs are rarely found in higher capacities
- SSDs wear out over time (each cell in a flash-memory bank can be written to and erased a limited number of times)
Conclusion
The requirement may vary but for a regular consumer a hybrid HDD and SSD combination is good to go, you can store your OS and Applications in SSD and use HDD for you media storage. SSD upgrade is a significant performance upgrade and it’s worth a shot if you experience long boot times & app load times.
