Solid State Drive Video Tutorial

Hard Drive or Solid State Drive Definition

Hard drives and solid state drives are responsible for storing all the information for a computer even when the power is turned off. Hard drives are cheaper and generally have much more space. Solid state drives run much faster but are significantly more expensive. Click here for more information about hard drives. Click here for more information about solid state drives.

SATA 2 vs SATA 3

SATA is a standard used to connect devices like hard drives, solid state drives, DVD drives, etc. to the motherboard.

SATA 2 is rated to run at 3 Gigabits per second. SATA 3 doubles that at 6 Gigabits per second. Realistically, SATA 2 can only achieve 300 Megabites per second, whereas SATA 3 can hit 600 Megabites per second.

Hard drives rarely ever reach the 300 MB/s limit of SATA 2 do to the limitations of their spinning platters. However, solid state drives have no moving parts and have reached speeds far above 300 MB/s. As SSD's continue to become faster, the need for faster SATA standards will continue to grow.

What is a Solid State Drive?

A solid state drive or SSD is the latest technology for storing information on your computer. But what's so great about it verses a hard drive? The best thing about SSD's are their insanely fast read and write speeds. SSD's can read at speeds as fast as 500MB/s! The average hard drive will only read around 70~130MB/s. That is a huge difference.

Not only that, but SSD's take almost no time accessing information. Conventional platter drives have to move physical parts to where the information is. This creates a lot of wasted time.

Because SSD's don't have physical parts to move, there's no reason to defragment your drive anymore! The purpose of defragmenting was keep all the information on your computer nice and organized so the hard drive wouldn't have to move around needlessly. SSD's can seamlessly find whatever information they need no matter how defragmented they may be!

Now for the downside...
Because SSD's are relatively new, they cost a lot of money per gigabyte. $200 will only get you around 128GB's with a SSD. With that kind of money, you can buy a hard drive with several TB's! The best way to deal with this is to buy a hard drive along with a SSD. You would install the things you use a lot, like the operating system, on the SSD. Everything else would be stored on the hard drive. This way, you get the best of both worlds.