What Is A Solid State Drive?

SSDs have a similar role as hard drives but are built using NAND Flash or DRAM memory chips in place of the magnetic spinning platters found in hard drives. SSDs have no moving parts, virtually eliminating the mechanical failures that affect hard drives and environmental failures such as heat, cold, vibration and shock. This makes SSDs ideal for mobile devices that require impact resistance. Solid state drives are not only more cost efficient than hard drives in the long run, but also provide substantial benefits over traditional hard drives. No matter the task, SSDs will improve it dramatically compared to HDDs.

Give New Life To An Older PC

Upgrading your computer with a new SSD can be one of the best ways to improve its overall performance. With an SSD, your system will start up and shut down quicker and applications will load faster and feel more responsive. With virtually instant data access times, SSDs outperform traditional hard drives in data lookup, file transfers, and other disk-intensive work. And without moving parts, SSDs use less battery power. Also, since SSDs consist of semiconductor memory and the latest technologies, their mean time between failures is approximately twice as long as that of hard drives, which doubles their reliability.

Use An SSD As A Boot Drive

Not ready to move all your data to an SSD? Loading your operating system and startup files on an SSD frees this space on your hard drive and significantly reduces your startup time. SSDs do not have to wait until the spinning rate increases, nor do they require head-seeking like hard drives do. This enables faster start-up time of the operating system and improves random access performance. It also significantly reduces energy consumption since all your programs would be on the SSD. In other words, you can use your SSD as the primary boot device and your current hard drive as a secondary device for file storage.

Greater Durability Faster Performance Less Power Consumption SSDs are Lighter SSDs are Cost-Efficient SSDs are Cooler SSDs are Quieter

SSD Video Tutorial

Images courtesy of OCZ Technology Group, Inc.