What is an SSD

What is an SSD? How do you find a good one?

When you want to store data on your computer you have two reasonable options you can go with an old slow but cheap option called a hard disk drive or you can go with this newer faster but more expensive option called a solid-state drive or SSD this video will focus on SSDs and discuss the differences between solid-state drives and hard drives by the end you'll know a bit more about how SSDs work and better understand how to pick out a good one so let's get started for a long time the only way to store information on your PC in a long term easily accessible manner was to use a hard disk drive which is the technology that dates all the way back to the 1950s these refrigerator-sized IBM 305's held 3.75 megabytes of data each just just about the amount of data used to store one photo taken by a modern smartphone inside hard drive suture a moving arm that writes data onto a spinning disk out of all of the types of memory in a modern computer hard drives are still the most cost effective way to store large amounts of data but they're also the slowest by comparison SSDs use flash memory which involves no moving parts flash memory is much faster than disk based memory but it comes with a higher cost thankfully flash memory technology evolves quickly prices continue to drop while storage sizes are on the rise making SSDs an increasingly viable alternative to hard drives this logarithmic graph shows a rough speed and size comparison between SSDs hard drives and RAM SSDs clearly fall in the middle between RAM and hard drives when it comes to speed and size they're about 10 times faster than hard drives while still being more than 10 times slower than Ram but they have the benefit of working as a long-term storage option just like a hard drive even if they can't currently store as much data and they can't do it as cost-effectively this is a Samsung 850 Evo SSD it has 120 gigabytes of storage and it transfers data at around 500 megabytes per second it uses a serial ata connection the current standard connection for a hard drive which maxes out at about the speed of this SSD this is a Western Digital blue hard drive has one terabyte of storage and it transfers data at around 30 megabytes per second making it about four times slower than the Samsung SSD it's also bigger and heavier and of course it uses serial ata connections this is also an SSD it's called the Samsung sm 951 it looks different than the first SSD because it connects to the PCI Express m2 port directly on 

Your motherboard instead of using serial ata allowing for even faster transfer speeds than serial ata this SSD has 256 gigabytes of storage with transfer speeds around 1,500 megabytes per second triple the speed of our other SSD and more than 10 times the speed of our hard drive on the left of this graph we have our fast PCI Express SSD in the middle is our standard serial ata SSD and on the right is our hard drive sequential speed is measured in blue and represents how fast large files like videos will transfer the green bars measure 4k input outputs per second which represents how quickly small files are accessed and transferred in this category the SSDs are so much faster that the results from the hard drive aren't even visible on the graph so huge numbers on a graph are fun but what are the real world benefits of having an SSD for starters an SSD will load everything on your PC faster than a hard drive for example if you install your operating system on an SSD your PC will boot up significantly faster in this PC world benchmark booting windows on the same computer took 63 seconds with a classic 7200 rpm hard drive and only 23 seconds with an SSD almost three times faster going from a system with just a hard drive to one that includes an SSD is probably the single most noticeable upgrade you can perform 

I like to compare it to switching from dial-up internet to broadband it's that big a difference to benefit from the speed of SSDs while not having to sacrifice storage space many people include both an SSD and a hard drive in their PC they'll install their operating system and their most commonly used applications and games on the SSD then use the hard drive to store files such as videos images and other documents for example we just took these two drives out of one of our office computers we use this SSD for Windows and some of our most use applications then we use this hard drive for all of our other files a PC feels fast even though we went with relatively cheap storage options for both the SSD and the hard drive so how do s SDS work and what types of SSDs are out there we've already talked about SSDs that use the older slower serial ata connection versus the newer faster m2 PCI Express connection different SSDs also use different types of flash memory the original flash memory type is SLC and it stores one bit of data per memory cell SLC is still used in some enterprise SSDs where maximum reliability is valued over cost mlc and TLC are newer types that store more data in the same amount of space sacrificing a bit of reliability for cheaper cost and more storage capacity 3-d or v-nand is a further enhancement to fit more data in less space involve stacking a bunch of memory cells on top of each other here we can see inside a Samsung 850 pro SSD the black packages on the green board contain the flash memory chip which are expanded above each flash memory chip contains billions of memory cells you can see a 3d stack of a few thousand if we zoom in on a small section so for sacrificing reliability to fit more data in the same amount of space how reliable are SSDs should you be worried about storing your important data in these little magic boxes the short answer is that SSDs or at least as reliable as hard drives in a desktop that are a way better choice for a laptop because they don't have any moving parts to break if they get dropped endurance was a problem with early SSDs because the individual memory cells a flash memory we're out faster than the magnetic disk of a hard drive with modern SSDs this is no longer an issue for normal users even a low endurance modern SSD could withstand writing a hundred gigabytes of data every single day for twenty years that's a lot 

I'm a fairly heavy computer user and I write about five gigabytes of data per day so I don't have to start worrying about the endurance of my SSD for at least three hundred and eighty years other factors affecting the reliability of an SSD are very similar to the rest of the parts in your computer SSDs contain solid state capacitors firmware a PCB electrical can vectors and all of the other little parts that can and do occasionally fail whether your data is on an SSD or hard drive always backup anything important couple additional advantages of SSDs are noise and power use SSDs are silent because they have no moving parts your fan of quiet computers this gives SSDs another big advantage over hard drives which can often be heard reading or writing with their spinning disk and moving parts SSDs also use less power this is more helpful for laptop battery life although it doesn't normally matter as much in a desktop if you can afford it we highly recommend getting an SSD you should at least consider adding a small SSD to install your operating system on as its one of the most noticeable PC upgrades you can make generally speaking all modern SSDs are fast and high quality your personal choice will mainly come down to size and price unless you want to look at a bunch of benchmarks to see which will get that extra little bit of performance when shopping around for an SSD we recommend looking at reviews and recommendations from reliable sources to make sure you're making a well informed choice we'll provide a few helpful links in the video description below if you have any questions leave them in the comments if you'd like to learn more about PC hardware Technical Info ICT