Last Updated on 12.09.2020 by DriverNew
See how much faster your system boots up, loads applications and transfers data with an SSD.
Upgrade to an solid state drive and your computer will have a much faster system boot up, applications load, and data transfers to ultimately save you time.
What are the differences between an SSD and an HDD?
HDDs are based on magnetic spinning platters, a technology that has been in use since the mid-1950s. The data is written to and read from these spinning platters or disks via moving heads. HDDs are mechanical devices with many moving parts, and are therefore more prone to mechanical failures and failures due to environmental conditions such as heat, cold, shock and vibration. In an SSD drive, the platters and heads are replaced by memory chips, similar to common USB, SD and CompactFlash products. SSDs have no moving parts, which virtually eliminates the rotational latencies associated with HDDs. Also, SSDs are less susceptible to damage from environmental conditions than HDDs. SSDs are designed to be the next generation of mass market data storage, and therefore have the same form factor and utilise the same SATA connections as current generation HDDs.
How much faster is an SSD?
This is a difficult question to answer, as no two systems are exactly the same and performance can be affected by the OS, any drivers loaded, applications in use, the speed and configuration of the processor and many other factors. There are several test web sites and magazines that have tested SSDs against HDDs and found SSDs to be much faster. For example, if we compared random read performance, SSDs are more than 20000% faster than high-performance HDDs.
It is worth noting that SSD drives are not affected by the physical limitations of hard drives. HDD platters are circular in design (like a CD) and data held at the centre of the circle is accessed at a slower rate than data on the edges. SSDs have a uniform access time across the entire drive. HDD performance also suffers from data fragmentation, whereas SSDs performance is not significantly impacted even if the data is not stored contiguously.
Are there any trade-offs when choosing an SSD over an HDD?
The only factor in favour of HDDs is the price per gigabyte; this is why HDDs are currently sold in capacities of 500GB and above, while SSDs are sold in capacities of 30GB and above. Kingston currently offers SSDs from 30GB to 960GB.
Traditional HDDs are best if mass storage is in the terabytes is your primary need, while SSDs are excellent if performance is more important. It’s common to use an SSD as a boot drive to hold OS and applications and an HDD to hold data files.
SSD Hardware Installation for Notebooks and Desktops. Transferring data
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