SDD, or Solid State Drive, is one of the newest generation of storage device that’s used for PCs and Laptops. In contrast to traditional Hard Disk Drives or HDD, a memory consisting of semiconductors is used to store data. Similar to what you can find in other devices such as Flash Drives and Memory Cards.
SDDs can help solve problems that we may encounter in our traditional hard drives.
Deferred read/write times.
- On traditional Hard Drives, the operation consists of a disk and a head. The disk rotates continuously while the head moves in an angular manner. This results to all information is not accessed at the same speed.
- The time depends on how far away the data you want to access is from the head. It looks like it might be a trivial problem but it’s actually not. The operation will perform several jumps in order to read all the information if a file is not stored contiguously. That’s why defragmentation is a must if you’re using an HDD so that the data will be sorted out in each of the files.
- Traditional HDDs are known to have sensitive parts compared to SDDs. Slight movements may result to damaging the dishes. Older units of HDDs needs to park the heads if you’re not going to use it.
How does an SSD work?
- An SDD has two memory areas. The first one is where all your information is saved, and the other one which is smaller that acts like a cache. These two is governed by a controller that acts depending on its different elements.
What benefits do I get when I buy an SSD?
- The speed of searching and reading your data is the same compared to traditional HDDs. No need to defragment if you’re data is contiguous or not since an SSD can manage this well.
- SSD has no mobile components compared to traditional HDDs. So no need to worry if your SSD will suffer such vibrations. SDDs are ideal if you want to carry it anywhere.
Lower Power Consumption
- SSDs only needs less power in order to function. This makes them as an ideal portable device than HDDS.
- Since SDDs doesn’t have moving parts inside, it can result to less noise compared to HDDs.
What are the disadvantages of SSD?
Traditional Hard Disks is the most use storage before. But there are some problems that we can encounter by using HDDs. And then came the SSD which solves all the problems the HDD had. But one disadvantage of SSDs is the price.
Aside from the price, SSDs also suffers from slowdowns as time goes by. The moment you first buy an SSD it will perform fast but it will tend to lose its speed over time. But this only happens on first generation SSDs. The new ones you can buy these days doesn’t have this problem anymore.
Are All SSD drives the same?
The answer is No. There are two kinds of SSDs that you can choose from in the market. Here are some of them:
- In this type of SSD, it connects to a PCI Express Port as if it’s an additional internal card. In this way, it can work faster and limitless compared to SATA ports.
- This SSD has the same connection port to a traditional HDD. It’s your only option if you want to put an SSD drive especially on your laptop.
Inside a computer system, the information that’s stored is a string of ones and zeros. Each of these elements is what we called memory bits.
In the first SSDs, each occupied a cell. And as time goes by and new generation SSDs are available, it tried to add more cells which results to SSDs with lower prices but at the same time tries to achieve the same storage capacity.
There are some side effects to this though. These memories had a shorter life cycle since the electrical voltage levels of each cell are closer. Below, we take a look on the different kinds of cells in an SSD.
- Stands for Single Level Cell. It consists of one bit per cell and the first one that’s used. This kind of cell can only be found in server environments because of its high price.
- Stands for Multi Level Cell. It consists of two bits per cell and can store four states.
- Stands for Triple Level Cell. It consists of three bits per cell and can store eight states.
Advantages and Disadvantages of an SSD Drive
The benefit of having an SSD is that it’s capable of storing data without the need of electrical current.
HDD or Hard Drives is one of the most used type of storage that’s been used for years. It’s made up of several magnetic plates where the information is stored. To access such data, the use of reading heads and dishes is necessary.
Times goes by and SSDs are created. It uses very similar components that you can find on USB flash drives which makes them more compact and mobile.
Having no moving parts can have many advantages including:
- SSDs doesn’t make any sound compared to HDDs. It’s great to use when you’re on a classroom and play movies without being caught.
- Traditional HDDs have dishes that rotates continuously to access the information you need. This results to a slower data reading especially if the data is not located continuously. On SSDs, this does not happen anymore as it uses different internal parts that can read data faster compared to HDDs.
- SDDs consume less power thanks to its mobile components inside.
Can Withstand Shocks
- Traditional HDDs are vulnerable to vibration and shocks and may result to long term damage. In SSDs, this does not happen.
As you can see, SSDs are ideal for laptops or any devices you’re going to use in mobility. SSDs is the proof that it revolutionized PC and laptop storage. Unfortunately, they still cost a lot compared to HDDs. So it may be a hard time for SDDs to displace traditional hard drives but they’re getting there.
To learn more about SSDs, here’s a top 10 list about SSDs:
They have no moving parts.
- It’s already stated in this article again and again that SSDs don’t have moving parts. As SSDs have small components the same you can find in USB storage drives. This results to a less noisy device that requires less energy to perform.
They don’t contain disks inside.
- SSDs don’t have disks inside, but still, they are called disks since they perform the same function of traditional hard disks. But inside, you’ll only find electronic circuitry.
- To make things short, SSD is the acronym of Solid State Drive. It can also be called Solid State Disk.
The use of NAND memory
- SSDs uses a type of memory called NAND. Its benefits is it can store data and information even there is no electrical current which is very ideal if you want a storage device on the go. The only disadvantage in this type of memory is that we must reset the whole block where we are going to perform the operation in order to write something in this memory.
- There’s only a limited amount of resets depending on what type of NAND memory we’ll use. Once you’ll be out of resets, the drive will fail. This is the reasons why SSDs carry a sufficient amount of memory inside than what they offered to the user. So that it can able to manage just in case of failures.
Not all of them are the same
- There are different kinds of connection ports for different SSDs. As we have mentioned earlier, we have the PCIe SSD which connects to the PCI Express port. And then we have the SATA SDD which connects to the SATA port. These SDDs also have different compounds such as SLC, MLC, TLC.
The RAID System
- Some hard drives uses the RAID system in order to store data. In a RAID 5 configuration, if you want to record a file of four megs, we use three disks with blocks of two megs where the first one we will write two. The remaining two disks, we use this to allow us to recover the information that’s stored just in case one of the disks stops functioning.
- Using this system, we can write and read on several disks at the same time. Inside an SSD, you can find NAND blocks that’ll be connected to form a RAID. Which results to greater speed and greater resistance in case of failure.
RAM is much faster
- There are SSDs that can reach up to 600mb/s of speed using a SATA III. When using a slow DDR3 RAM, it can become 10 times faster than a SATA SDD which can reach up to 30 times faster or even more.
The importance of IOPS
- SDDs contain IOPS. Which can perform three to four times faster compared to traditional HDDs. IOPS is the measure of the number of operations per second that a device can perform. In traditional hard drives, having such is very limited because the time that the disk rotates is very slow if you want to read or write data. In SSDs, this never happens.
SDD is best for running applications and operating system
- SDDs is your best friend when it comes to applications and your operating system. But if you don’t have the budget, you can buy a cheap SDD with small storage where it can store your applications and operating system files.
- You can use traditional hard drives to store, for example, your movies. Since it doesn’t require such speed to read and write data for that file.
Reading data doesn’t take much time compared to writing data
- Writing data on an SSD is slower compared to reading data. As it performs a memory reset that we have mentioned earlier in this article. Resetting data has to be done on a block level and not bytes. Which results to rewrite information even the ones you didn’t even delete.
The Disadvantage and Advantages of SSD
Even if we see SSD is a viable choice compared to HDDs. There are some advantages and disadvantages on the device. Such of these include:
Hard drives still has an advantage
- There are still some problems in SSDs that are not yet solved, and hard drives doesn’t have these problems. Such example is one of the first SDDs had performance issues which never happened to tradition hard drives.
Pricey compared to HDD
- The pricing is the only real problem of an SSD. Even though we have seen about it’s good benefits compared to traditional HDDs, it’s up to you if you’re going to buy one and experience its benefits.
It speeds everything up
- Having an SSD means faster speeds for your PC or laptop. Once you have an SSD, you’ll notice that your computer startup will load faster and applications will run smoother.