What Is A Solid-State Drive?

Many new, modern laptops come fully equipped with what is known as a solid-state drive, or an SSD. Having been around for some time, this method of computer storage has only recently come to the fore as a viable and effective alternative to the traditional hard drive. Now they are one of the most popular storage devices and they are starting to become standard in many new laptops and computers on the market.

But what is the difference between an SSD and a standard hard drive? The largest difference between the two computer memory solutions is that SSDs aren’t actually hard drives at all, at least not in the traditional sense of the term. They contain no moving parts and operate through semiconductor memory and integrated circuits rather than the magnetic options used in standard hard drives. This shift away from moving parts has many advantages, the first being that data transfer between SSDs and other devices is much faster than hard drives which use moving parts to read or write data.

Latency and transfer times are vastly reduced. Latency has been compared with attempting to find a passage in a certain book; this process of searching for data across a drive is much easier with an SSD. The transfer time can be likened to how fast one can read said passage once it has been accessed. Once the data has been found on the drive, how long does it take before it available to view or edit? Boot times are also reduced, and without moving parts in a device, there is much less chance for damage or malfunction. They can’t break or wear down, but they do have a finite number of write cycles before the SSDs performance starts to dip.

It has been the rapidly expanding need for higher performance levels that has driven the development of the SSD in recent years. Real-time information is a requirement for many name, and a large number of business and even leisure users of laptops and computers need to be able to access data instantly. The only stumbling block in the past was the price; being harder to manufacture, the SSD was originally much more expensive than a hard drive, and many experts said that the product wasn’t worth the price. But now improvements in technology have facilitated a price drop in SSDs, causing mass re-evaluation of the drives as a viable alternative to their existing computer memory.