Recently solid state drives (SSD) have entered the market in full force – intially these new drives were expensive and rather hard to obtain; however, the prices are currently falling to levels that make sense for the regular consumer. But, what is a solid state drive – and why should you care?
The Traditional Hard Drive
The traditional hard drive is composed of a disk, a laser, and a reader, similar to a CD or DVD and player. These drives function by physically writing data onto the disk and then using the reader to retrieve the data and make use of it. This is all well and dandy, but these hard drives have several problems: 1) they’re prone to failure (moving parts = more opportunities to fail), 2) they are very loud and noisy and 3) the upload/download speed is limited by the speed of the disk. The disk in the hard drive is constantly spinning, this is the whizzing sound you often hear coming from your computer. As the disk spins, data is written in rings around the disk. Since the data is located on a physical location on the disk, if the data is not retrieved on the first trip around the disk, the hard drive must continue to spin and read until all data is retrieved – this causes a bottleneck in the amount of data that can be written or accessed at any given time. In short – older drives like this are severely limited in how quickly they can pull data off the disk.
The Solid State Drive
Solid state drives consist entirely of flash memory, much like that in a flash drive. These chips store information electronically, so there is little or no lag time between request, access and retrieval. More so, with no moving parts, these drives are extremely reliable and very, very fast.
What does this all mean in the grand scheme of things? With a SSD computers load information drastically quicker. I recently upgraded from the traditional hard drive to an SSD and I have seen an incredible increase in speed. Previously Windows 7 took about 1 minute to 1 minute 30 seconds to boot up, with a SSD Windows loads in less than 30 seconds without fail.
There are quite a few videos on Youtube giving boot time comparisons between standard hard drives and SSDs. Here is one of my favorites:
Consider an SSD for your primary drive with your next Chi build!
