What does ssd mean in computers

This is a concern in laptops, but not as much in desktops. The benefits of a hard disk drivs are that they are a proven technology, and are frequently less expensive than a solid state drives for the same amount of storage.

Solid state drives use flash memory to deliver superior performance and durability. Because there are lots of small, moving parts inside your hard drive — magnetic heads, spindles, and spinning platters — it's easy for things to go wrong and you could lose your important data. Without moving parts, SSDs are more durable, run cooler and use less energy.

NAND, the technology in solid state drives, is a type of flash memory. At the lowest level, floating gate transistors record a charge or lack of a charge to store data. The gates are organized in a grid pattern, which is further organized into a block. Block size can vary, but each row that makes up the grid is called a page. Updating data is more complex for SSDs.

All the data in a block must be refreshed when any portion of it is updated. The data on the old block is copied to a different block, the block is erased, and the data is rewritten with the changes to a new block. Each time you ask your computer to retrieve or update data, the SSD controller looks at the address of the data requested and reads the charge status.

When the drive is idle, a process called garbage collection goes through and makes sure the information in the old block is erased and that the block is free to be written to again. Because there are a finite number of times any block can be rewritten, this is an important process that prevents premature wear on the storage drive. This process is called wear leveling and happens automatically as the drive is working.

This allows room for the drive to move and delete items without affecting the overall storage capacity. Although they are catching up, it can be harder to find large-capacity solid state drives. HDDs can be as much as 2. Why choose a solid state drive? SSDs deliver faster load times for games, applications, and movies. Early experiments with SSD-like technology started in the s, and by the s and s they were being used in high-end supercomputers.

However, the technology was extremely expensive, and the storage capacity was small 2MBMBs compared to the ludicrous 5-digit prices. In the early s, hardware innovations caused SSD prices to drop. However, the lifespan and size were still an issue: An SSD had a lifespan of roughly 10 years. Instead of a magnetic platter, files are saved on a grid of NAND flash cells. Each grid also called blocks can store between KB and 4MB. The controller of an SSD has the exact address of the blocks, so that when your PC requests a file it is almost instantly available.

SSD access times are thus measured in nanoseconds. Note that the era of traditional hard disk drives is far from over. Among our own Avast users, a vast majority still have old-school mechanical drives. But they have since become an accepted option -- or even the default choice -- in lower-cost mainstream laptops and PCs. Business : Companies working with huge amounts of data such as programming environments or data analysis often rely on SSDs, as access times and file-transfer speeds are critical.

Gaming : Gaming computers have always pressed the limits of current computing technology, justifying relatively expensive equipment for the benefit of gaming performance. That is particularly true for storage, as modern blockbuster games constantly load and write files e. Mobility : SSDs have low power requirements, thus contributing to better battery life in laptops and tablets. SSDs are also shock resistant, which reduces the chances of data loss when mobile devices are dropped.

So what does it all mean? To attach an SSD to your system, you need to connect it using a specific interface. Common interfaces are:. NVMe boasts up to 16 GBits per second of raw throughput which, thanks to multiple parallel channels, runs at up to 4, MB per second.

SSDs are available in all sorts of storage capacity, starting at around 32 GB and ranging up to 5 TB in the consumer space. Max is a tech expert and as such you'll find his words throughout T3. Max is specifically a veteran when it comes round to deal hunting, with him seeing out multiple Black Friday campaigns to date.

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