Here’s Why Your PC Should Have An SSD
July 14, 2020SSD, an acronym for Solid State Drive, is a type of non-volatile storage solution widely used in a vast number of computers and devices. Unlike traditional hard drives (Hard Disk Drives), where data is written on a metal platter, SSDs use NAND technology, similar in principle to that of USB drives. And as such, are significantly faster than traditional mechanical hard drives.
A standard mechanical hard drive is able to read and write data at a rate of 80-160MB/s, which is significantly lower than that of SSDs. Even the least capable SSDs are able to read/write data at a rate of 320MB/s to 400MB/s. And NvME SSDs, the wafer sized ones (not to be confused with M.2 SATA SSDs) , are able to offer read and write speeds of over 2000MB/s.
Photo Credit: Kingston.com
Mechanical hard drives are slow to react to user demands, and this coupled with the fact that they tend to deliver appalling read/write speeds, make their PCs woefully slow to operate. A cheap SSD will allow a low powered PC with an Intel Celeron chip to boot up in under 15 seconds (under 2 minutes for HDDs). That’s an incredible performance advantage.
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How To Know which drive(s) is in your PC?
If you’re running Windows, press the Windows key and R button to open the Search box. Here, type in dfrgui and click Enter. This will execute the Disk Defragmenter window. Here, your PC will tell you what drives you have, and whether they are SSDs or HDDs.
Older laptops or PCs will benefit greatly from an SSD upgrade. Machines from as early as 2008 with humble Intel Pentium chips, will feel extremely responsive when run on an SSD compared with a regular mechanical hard drive (HDD). In addition to this, SSDs use less power, thus help you save precious battery power on aging laptops.
