SSD buying guide

Solid State Drives, more commonly referred to as SSDs, are a great way to speed up your computer’s loading times. A portable SSD will also make moving files from PC to PC a breeze, instead of something you need to set aside time for.

However, buying an SSD can be somewhat tricky if you aren’t across all of the confusing technical jargon. With a vast amount of options available, it can be hard to figure out which SSD is right for you, let alone compatible with your PC.

SSD vs HDD? Which is Better?

All comes to instructions being run by your computer. A typical PC is able to run billions of instructions, but your PC uses data(operating system, games, images,) from storage that provide their data according to their speed. You can imagine it as a large pipe connected to a small pipe. However large the previous pipe is, the water we get will be according to the smaller pipe.

HDD

Similarly, our PC is capable of sending large no if instructions quickly, but our storage isn’t that fast still. Prior HDDs had speeds of 4200 rpm to 7200 rpm for consumer computers. This speed correlates with read/write rates that mean extracting data or editing data. HDDs are fairly cheap than a typical SSD, but with slower read/write rates you also have data loss danger. Your data can be lost as it’s a mechanical device that can skip sectors, and a usual issue of HDDs is getting corrupted because of damaged mechanical parts

SSD

SSDs on the other hand are fairly faster with read/write rates going ridiculously high up til 8,750TBW (terabytes written) rating. We love to get things done instantly, and SSD makes it happen. SSDs are durable as there are no movable parts that don’t let it heat up and in turn use less energy. It’s fast as well as it doesn’t use any mechanical parts to access data, while it uses charge as a measure.

Performance

SSD performance is classified using two different parameters: the sequential speed which indicates the theoretical maximum speed at which data is read from or written to disk sequentially (for example, large files progressively transferred to the unit), and the IOPS (input / output operations per second) which instead indicate the speed with which the data is read or written at random, using small files of 4KB. Sequential speed is expressed in MB / s (Megabyte per second) or GB / s (Gigabyte per second), while IOPS are expressed in number (that is, the maximum number of input and output operations that the unit can « hold »« Every second). In the daily use of an SSD, the IOPS value is more important than the sequential speed

How much local storage do you really need?

The smallest common SSD size is just 128GB, which is about 25 percent of the capacity of the 500GB hard drives you find on many budget laptops. You can easily fit Windows 10 (20GB), Office 365 (3GB), Chrome (under 500MB installed) and even Photoshop (3.1GB) on such a drive, but the minute you start working with files or even running Windows updates, the drive will fill up quickly. It's also important to note that, if your SSD is more than 75 percent full, performance may suffer.