When did ssd come out

Data transfer is not sequential on an SSD; this is a random access so it is faster. Read performance is consistent as the physical location of the data is irrelevant. SSDs do not have read / write heads and therefore no latency due to head movement (seek).

Evolution of the Solid-State Drive

From early versions that cost thousands of dollars for 256KB to the bulky, high-speed drives that power MacBook Airs, SSDs are skyrocketing.

Believe it or not, it’s been 35 years since the first solid state drive (aka solid state drive) hit the market. Like all SSDs, this model is designed to look like a traditional rotary disk on your computer, while storing and retrieving data much faster than traditional hard drives. Such devices are called “semiconductor” because they have no moving parts, only memory chips.

Over the years, the computing industry’s quest for faster, cheaper, higher capacity SSDs has fueled storage technology in ways that no one could have anticipated in 1976, including the use of SSDs as the primary storage component in some personal computers.

In the next 15 slides, you’ll witness the evolution of the SSD, from a bulky, obscenely expensive server accessory to a tiny consumer box (hundreds of gigabytes in capacity) that anyone can buy for $ 50.

The World’s First SSD

In 1976, Dataram introduced the world’s first solid state drive, Bulk Core. The product consisted of a rackmount case 19 inches wide by 15.75 inches high, which would hold up to eight separate memory cards, each containing 256 KB of RAM chips. Overall, the Bulk Core system could provide a massive 2MB of memory for minicomputers such as the DEC PDP-11 and Data General Nova. Data access times ranged from 0.75 milliseconds to 2 milliseconds, depending on the controller board. (Today SSDs regularly have an access time of 0.06 ms.)

The Bulk Core configuration, including the controller board and 256KB of memory, cost $ 9,700 in 1977, which is now $ 36,317. At that price, a 1TB SSD (which costs around $ 1,100 today) would cost $ 152 billion.

Photos: Dataram Corporation

With SSDs, there are no such physical limitations to the read / write head. So, the physical location of the data on the disk does not matter as it does not affect performance. Therefore, defragmentation is not necessary with SSDs.

Shapes and Sizes

The most common and perhaps most famous SSDs are direct replacements for hard drives, but modern ultra-thin laptops often use different types, and here it can get confusing.

2.5″ SATA

2.5 inch SATA SSDs have the same size, shape and connector type as the equivalent hard drives, but are lighter in weight and typically only 7mm thick, while 2.5 inch hard drives can be up to 15mm for larger capacities. Therefore, you may need to add some kind of packaging when replacing a 2.5 inch hard drive with an SSD to keep it in the bay.

1.8″ MicroSATA or μSATA

They are similar to 2.5 inch SATA drives, but with a 1.8 inch form factor and a smaller version of the SATA connector. They are sometimes used in smaller devices such as netbooks.

MiniSATA or mSATA

MSATA SSDs are still much smaller, but they simply consist of a small PCB the size of a business card. They have a gold-plated edge connector that fits into a slot similar to a RAM slot, and two screw fixing holes in the corners of the opposite edge.

The physical dimensions and connector are identical to the PCI Express Mini Card, which is used in older internal laptop WiFi adapters, but the connections are different and therefore cannot be used interchangeably.

M.2 SSDs can be available in various sizes marked with a code indicating width and length, e.g. 2280 is 22mm wide (the most common) and 80mm long (including the edge connector).

Confusingly, there are two different flavors distinguished by a key notch in the edge joint. It can be one (or both) of two different positions, known as the B key and the M key. The terminology only adds to the confusion, and if that wasn’t enough, other devices like the newer laptop WiFi adapters are also M.2 devices.

M.2 has different pins on the edge connector for several different interface types, in particular SATA (used for disks), PCIe (PCI Express: faster than SATA and used for disks but not only disks), SMBus (used for device management peripherals) and USB. However, different M.2 cards support different combinations of these interfaces, and the M.2 slot may not be connected to all of them. For example, if you mounted an M.2 SSD in the M.2 WiFi adapter slot designed to support USB devices, it might work if the SSD supports USB in addition to SATA or PCIe, but the M.2 SSD slot which can only be connected to devices SATA or PCIe, it is less likely to accept a Wi-Fi adapter that requires it to act as a USB device.

NGFF is another name for M.2.

Note: The positions of the B and M key are almost symmetrical, which means you can press the B key card upside down into the M key connector (or vice versa) if you have purchased the wrong type by mistake. Do not do this! There is a serious risk that you will destroy both the M.2 device and the circuitry on the motherboard behind the M.2 socket, as well as physically damaging the socket itself.

B-key cards (sometimes known as Socket 2) offer SATA and SMBus interfaces and can support USB. They are sometimes referred to as SATA rather than a B key. Optionally, they can also have an M key and offer two PCIe channels (described in the specifications as PCIe x2) for greater compatibility.

Under the Bonnet

Unlike a hard drive, an SSD has no moving parts or delicate mechanisms, making it much more durable and resistant to physical shocks, and requiring less energy. But that’s just the beginning.

The way an SSD works radically differs from a hard drive in several respects:

• An SSD stores data as electrostatic charges on a silicon chip, while a hard drive stores it as patterns of magnetism on a spinning magnetic disk.
• When you write data to a hard drive, it simply overwrites all previous data in the same location on the disk, re-magnetizing it with new data. But you can’t write zeros to SSD, you can only write ones. (All data is made up of ones and zeros.) Therefore, the area you want to write to must be erased (set to all zeros) before starting.
• It’s impossible to erase a little SSD here and a little bit there. It only allows you to erase a fairly large block (measured in megabytes) of memory at once. (This is just one of the trade-offs that allowed for huge storage capacities.)
• On the hard disk, it takes the same amount of time to read and write (unless it is reading a marginal block requiring retry and error correction). Reading from an SSD is really fast, but writing is much slower and erasing is even slower.
• You can write to the hard drive as many times as you want without consuming the magnetic surface, but writing to an SSD does wear out. Therefore, the SSD will choose where to put the data itself and remember where it was to distribute the consumption. This is called wear leveling.

A consequence of all this is that as you create, edit, and delete files, more and more memory blocks will contain some data that is still up-to-date, and a lot not (deleted and old versions of files, known as “stale” data). After all, you won’t have empty blocks to write new data to, even if your SSD may only be half full with up-to-date data. To deal with this problem, the operating system (Windows, MacOS, or Linux) tells the SSD which data is no longer needed, through a process known as TRIM. As a background job, the SSD then tries to consolidate the current data into fewer blocks, freeing up blocks that can be deleted and made available for reuse. This process is known as garbage collection.

All of this takes a lot of work for an SSD, keeping track of where all your data is located and which ones are still needed and which aren’t. So if something goes wrong it can go very badly, leaving your SSD completely confused and unable to function. This can happen, for example, in the event of a sudden loss of power or an overvoltage while the SSD was in the process of cleaning up garbage. SSDs (certainly the better ones) are designed to deal with this eventuality, but it does happen sometimes. On the other hand, when a hard drive fails, it often does so more gracefully, causing more and more read errors and thus giving you a better chance of data recovery. Therefore, a hard drive may be more suitable than an SSD for backup.

SSDs and the technologies they are built upon are cursed with a veritable scourge of technical terms and acronyms. With the speed of technological advancement, some of them become irrelevant as soon as new ones emerge. Probably the only ones that are significant in our context are:

• SLC (Single Level Cell): each memory cell is fully charged or empty, representing one bit, 0 or 1.
• MLC (Multi-Level Cell): Each cell can be loaded to one of 4 levels representing two bits, 00, 01, 10 or 11.
• TLC (Triple-Level Cell): Now we have 8 levels in each cell, representing three bits.
• QLC (Four Level Cell): I think you can see what we’re getting at. 16 levels, four bits.

As sophisticated as they have become, hard drives have been around since 1956. These back then were a meter and a half in diameter and could only store a few megabytes of information, but the technology has improved so much that you can cram 10 terabytes into something about the same size as a kitchen sponge.

SSD advantages

External SSD drives are also becoming more and more popular.

Solid-state drives are becoming more common in everything from high-end gaming PCs to entry-level laptops, and for good reason. They have several advantages over traditional hard drives and built-in flash memory (eMMC).

No Moving Parts: The big problem with moving parts in hard drives is that they are a major point of failure. If any of the moving parts break, the entire drive becomes unusable. This makes traditional hard drives susceptible to damage and wear over time.

SSDs have their own lifetime limitations, but are generally more durable and reliable. There are no moving parts to damage and no drive motor to break. This reliability makes SSDs ideal for portable external drives that may undergo more stringent usage and handling.

Speed: SSDs can write or read data at an incredible speed compared to hard drives and even eMMC, which is useful for transferring large blocks of data. More importantly, their random access times are given in microseconds, not milliseconds. That’s why SSD systems start up so fast, games load so fast, and SSD based systems are just fast and responsive.

Mobility: SSDs are smaller and lighter than previous drives. This development enables the creation of today’s ultra-thin laptops, tablets and other mobile devices. The thinnest SSDs are just millimeters wide and only a few inches long, making them ideal for the smallest high-speed devices.

Low failure rate: After years of development, SSDs run much less frequently than hard drives and maintain their speed throughout their service life. Low failure rates are due to extensive material and feature improvements such as Error Correction Code (ECC) that keep SSDs on the right path.

Size and Design: SSDs can come in many different shapes and sizes depending on the number of chips you have and the overall chip layout. They can fit into the graphics card slot, 2.5-inch drive bays and M.2 slots. There are SSDs for just about every occasion, which makes them much more versatile than other types of storage.

Longer Lifespan: Each SSD has a lifetime that is limited by the drive’s ability to properly store the electric charges sent to it. The lifespan of hard drives is typically measured by the number of terabytes that can be written to the drive before the flash cells degrade. That could mean a decade or more of use for the typical buyer. Studies have shown that SSDs not only last longer than their HDD counterparts, but also last longer than experts expected.

Types of SSDs

SSDs come in several different shapes and sizes, which can affect their speed, memory capacity, and even thermal power.

SATA III: SATA III is the latest evolution of a legacy connection option that works with both HDD and SSD. This was an advantage during the transition from HDD to SSD, as hard disk compatible motherboards could then work with the new standard. It’s still the most used one in modern SSDs, but by far the slowest at around 550MB / s. It also includes a SATA cable that connects the drive to the motherboard, so adds to the clutter.

PCIe: The Peripheral Component Interconnect Express or PCI Express (PCIe) slot is typically used for graphics and expansion cards such as USB ports and sound cards. However, there are now PCIe SSDs that can use all the extra bandwidth for blazingly fast data transfers.

The latest generation of PCIe 4.0 drives was first introduced on AMD X570 motherboards and can deliver sequential read speeds of up to 5,000MB / s and write speeds of up to 4,400MB / s. Their prices are often more than double their SATA counterparts, and all that extra bandwidth doesn’t always make a big difference in real-world use.

M.2: These SSDs are the smallest and balance space and performance well, although speed may vary. They use both SATA and NVMe controllers, which may confuse some.

M.2 SSDs have a short pin connector and lie flush with the motherboard, which is great for saving space. However, they overheat quickly due to low airflow, especially with high-performance drives. To prevent overheating, M.2 SSDs sometimes contain heat sinks or heat spreaders

NVMe: Express non-volatile memory enables almost all types of PCI Express and M.2 SSDs to transfer data to and from the host system. The combination of NVMe with these interfaces provides efficient speeds that are perfectly suited to high-performance storage systems.

HDD technology does not stand still, and the price for a stored unit has dropped dramatically. As we said in our post “HDD vs. SSD: what’s the future of storage? – lot 2 ”, the cost of one gigabyte of hard drives has dropped by two billion times in approximately 60 years.

Reliability

Unlike HDDs, SSDs have no moving parts. So the reliability of SSD is higher. Moving parts in HDD increase the risk of mechanical failure. The rapid movement of platters and heads inside a hard drive makes it prone to “head failure”. Head failure can be caused by electronics failure, sudden power failure, physical shock, wear, corrosion, or poorly made platters and heads. Another factor influencing reliability is the presence of magnets. Hard drives use magnetic memory, so they are prone to data corruption or corruption when in close proximity to strong magnets. SSDs are not affected by this magnetic distortion.

Wear-out

When flash first started gaining momentum for long-term storage, there was a concern about wear and tear, especially as some experts warned that due to the way SSDs work, the number of write cycles they can achieve is limited. However, SSD manufacturers have put a lot of effort into product architecture, disk controllers, and read / write algorithms, and in practice, wear is not an issue with SSDs in most practical applications. 2

Price

As of June 2015, SSDs are still more expensive per gigabyte than hard drives, but SSD prices have dropped significantly in recent years. When external hard drives are nearby

Storage capacity

Until recently, SSDs were too expensive and only available in smaller sizes. 128GB and 256GB laptops are common when using SSDs, while laptops with internal HDDs typically range from 500GB to 1TB. Some vendors – including Apple – offer “fusion” drives that combine 1 SSD and 1 HDD to work together seamlessly.

However, with 3D NAND memory, SSDs are likely to close the capacity gap compared to HDDs by the end of 2016. In July 2015, Samsung announced that it was releasing 2TB SSDs that use SATA connectors. 3 While HDD technology is probably limited to around 10TB, there is no such limitation for flash storage. In fact, in August 2015, Samsung unveiled the world’s largest hard drive – a 16TB SSD.

.04 per gigabyte, a typical flash SSD is approx

Defragmentation in HDDs

Due to the physical nature of hard drives and their magnetic platters on which data is stored, I / O (reading from or writing to the disk) is much faster when data is stored continuously on the disk. When file data is stored in different parts of the disk, I / O speeds are reduced because the disk must rotate for different regions of the disk to contact the read / write heads. Often times, there is not enough space to store all the data in a file. This causes fragmentation of the hard disk. Periodic defragmentation is needed to keep the device from slowing down.

With SSDs, there are no such physical limitations to the read / write head. So, the physical location of the data on the disk does not matter as it does not affect performance. Therefore, defragmentation is not necessary with SSDs.

0.50 for GB. This is a decrease from around 3,500 GB in early 2012.

In effect, this means you can buy a 1TB external hard drive (HDD) for $ 55 on Amazon (see External Hard Drive Bestsellers), while a 1TB SSD costs around $ 475. (see the list of the best-selling internal SSDs and external SSDs).

Price outlook

In a influential article for Network Computing in June 2015, storage consultant Jim O’Reilly wrote that SSD storage prices were falling very fast, and with 3D NAND technology, SSDs are likely to hit the same price as HDDs in late 2016.

There are two main reasons for the decline in SSD prices:

1. Increasing Density: 3D NAND technology was a breakthrough that made it possible to quantum leap in SSD capacity as it allows packing 32 or 64 times the capacity per cube.
2. Process Efficiency: Flash memory production has become more efficient and die efficiency has increased significantly.

An article published in Computer World in December 2015 predicted that 40% of new laptops sold in 2017, 31% in 2016, and 25% of laptops in 2015 would use SSDs instead of HDDs. The article also reported that while hard drive prices have not dropped too much, SSD prices have consistently dropped month by month and are approaching a level comparable to that of HDDs.

In the next 15 slides, you’ll witness the evolution of the SSD, from a bulky, obscenely expensive server accessory to a tiny consumer box (hundreds of gigabytes in capacity) that anyone can buy for $ 50.

NAND Flash Technology and Solid-State Drives (SSDs)

If you own a Kingston USB flash drive or SD card, you already have products that include flash memory, also known as NAND flash. Worldwide, NAND flash memory consumption has accelerated rapidly in the past five years, and new products such as SSDs are now entering the market for enterprise computing devices such as notebooks, desktops, workstations, and servers.

Here’s a quick rundown of what you need to know about NAND Flash.

Non-Volatile NAND Flash Memory

One of the benefits of NAND flash memory is non-volatile data storage. Unlike DRAM, which must be powered continuously to retain data, NAND memory retains data even when powered off – making it ideal for storing portable devices.

Types of NAND Flash

There are currently five types of NAND flash, and the difference between each is in the number of bits each cell can store. Each cell can store data – one bit per cell for SLC NAND, two bits per cell for MLC, three bits per cell for TLC, four bits per cell for QLC, and five bits per cell for PLC. Thus, SLC NAND stores “0” or “1” in each cell, MLC NAND stores “00”, “01”, “10” or “11” in each cell, and so on. These five types of NAND memory offer different levels of performance and endurance at different price points, with SLC being the more efficient and most costly NAND on the market.

3D NAND

In 3D NAND, multiple layers of memory cells are arranged vertically along with connections between the layers. Stacking multiple layers of memory cells into vertical tiers provides greater storage capacity while taking up less space and increasing performance by allowing shorter connections for each memory cell. It also lowers the cost per byte compared to 2D NAND. 3D NAND flash devices can use MLC, TLC or QLC designs.

NAND Cell Wear Leveling

NAND cells are not designed to last forever. Unlike DRAMs, their cells will wear out over time because the write cycles are more strenuous than the read cycles. NAND storage devices have a limited number of write cycles, but wear leveling manages the cell usage realized by the flash controller, which is always on the device. All USB flash drives, SD cards, and SSDs are equipped with a NAND controller that manages the NAND flash memory and performs functions such as wear-leveling and error correction.

To extend the life of NAND storage devices, the NAND Flash controller ensures that all recorded data is evenly distributed over all physical blocks of the device so as not to consume one area of ​​NAND storage faster than another.

Solid-State Drives (SSDs)

Over the past few years, the cost of NAND flash has fallen so much that new core storage devices such as solid-state drives have become available for client systems and servers. SSDs are direct replacements for hard drives (or standard rotating hard drives) in computers with compatible interfaces such as SATA or SAS.

SSD drives offer significant performance and endurance advantages over standard hard drives. SSDs have no moving parts; they are all semiconductor devices. For this reason, SSDs are not subject to the mechanical delay that hard drives do, and without moving parts, SSDs can be subjected to much greater shock and vibration than a hard drive, making them ideal for a wide variety of portable and mobile applications.

Whether you’re using a HDD or SSD, a good backup plan is essential as every drive will fail in the end. You should have a local backup combined with an off-site secure backup that follows a 3-2-1 backup strategy. To get you started, check out our Backup Guide.

In This Corner: The Hard Disk Drive

The traditional spinning hard drive has been the standard for generations of personal computers. The continuously improved technology has enabled hard drive manufacturers to pack more storage capacity than ever, at a cost of one gigabyte, which still makes hard drives the most cost-effective.

As sophisticated as they have become, hard drives have been around since 1956. These back then were a meter and a half in diameter and could only store a few megabytes of information, but the technology has improved so much that you can cram 10 terabytes into something about the same size as a kitchen sponge.

Inside the hard drive is something that looks a bit like an old turntable: there is a platter or stacked platters that rotate around a central axis – the spindle – usually around 5,400 to 7,200 revolutions per minute. Some hard drives built for performance run faster.

Information is written to and read from the disk by changing the magnetic fields on rotating platters with an armature called a read-write head. Visually, it looks a bit like a turntable arm, but instead of the stylus that runs in a physical groove on the record, the read / write head rises slightly above the physical surface of the disc.

The two most common sizes of hard drives are 2.5 inches, typical for laptops, and 3.5 inches, common for desktops. You’ll also find external drives with 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch drives. The size is standardized, which makes it easy to repair and replace when something goes wrong.

The vast majority of drives in use today connect via a standard interface called Serial ATA (or SATA). Specialized storage systems sometimes use Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Fiber Channel, or other exotic interfaces designed for special purposes.

Hard Disk Drives Cost Advantage

Proven technology that has been used for decades makes hard drives cheap – much cheaper per gigabyte than SSDs. HDD storage can cost as little as three cents per gigabyte. You don’t spend a lot, but you get a lot of space. Hard drive manufacturers continue to increase storage capacity while keeping costs low, so hard drives remain the choice of anyone looking for a large amount of storage without spending a lot of money.

The downside is that hard drives can be energy intensive, generate noise, generate heat, and not run as fast as SSDs. Perhaps the biggest difference is that hard drives, with all their similarities to turntables, are ultimately mechanical devices. Mechanical devices will wear out over time. It’s not about if, it’s about when.

HDD technology does not stand still, and the price for a stored unit has dropped dramatically. As we said in our post “HDD vs. SSD: what’s the future of storage? – lot 2 ”, the cost of one gigabyte of hard drives has dropped by two billion times in approximately 60 years.

Hard drive manufacturers have made huge advances in technology to store more and more information on HD platters – referred to as surface density. As hard drive manufacturers struggle to outdo each other, consumers are benefiting from ever larger drive sizes. One technique is to replace the air in the drives with helium, which reduces friction and provides a higher surface density. Other recent technologies include microwave and heat assisted magnetic recording, MAMR and HAMR, respectively. HAMR records magnetically using laser-thermal assistance, and MAMR uses a microwave generating device called a torque oscillator or laser to store more data on the drive plate.These drives are in the early stages of production and shipping to corporate partners.

In the Opposite Corner: The Solid-state Drive

SSDs have become much more popular in recent years. They are a standard problem across the entire line of Apple laptops, for example the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air come standard with SSDs. The same goes for the Mac Pro.

Semiconductor is the industry acronym for integrated circuit, and this is the key difference between an SSD and a hard disk: There are no moving parts inside the SSD. Instead of disks, motors, and read / write heads, SSDs use flash memory – that is, computer chips that retain information even when the power is turned off.

SSDs work basically the same way as memory in a smartphone or tablet. But SSDs found in modern Macs and PCs run faster than memory in a mobile device.

The mechanical nature of hard drives limits their overall performance. Hard drive manufacturers are working tirelessly to increase data transfer speeds and reduce latency and idle time, but there are only a limited number of them. SSDs provide a huge performance advantage over hard drives – they start up faster, shut down faster, and transfer data faster.

If you’re still using your computer with a SATA hard drive, you may notice a huge performance boost when you upgrade to an SSD. Moreover, the cost of SSDs has dropped drastically in the last few years, so upgrading like this is cheaper than ever.

A Range of SSD Form Factors

SSDs can be smaller and use less power than hard drives. They do not make noise and can be more reliable as they are not mechanical. As a result, computers designed to use SSDs can be smaller, thinner, lighter, and last much longer on a single battery charge than computers that use hard drives.

Many SSD manufacturers produce SSD mechanisms that are designed as plug-and-play replacements for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch hard drives, as there are millions of existing computers (and many new computers still have hard drives installed).) that may benefit from the change. They feature the same SATA interface and power connector found on a hard drive.

Currently, a wide variety of SSD formats are available. Memory cards, once limited to a maximum of 128 MB, are now available in capacities up to 2 TB. They are mainly used in mobile devices where size and density are the main factor, such as cameras, phones, drones and so on. Other high-density enclosures are designed for data center applications, such as the Intel 32TB P4500. Reminiscent of a standard 12-inch ruler, the Intel SSD DC P4500 has a capacity of 32TB. Stacking 64 extremely thin layers of 3D NAND, the P4500 is currently the densest SSD in the world. The price is not available yet, but considering that the DC P4500 SSD only requires a tenth of the power and only one-twentieth of the space of a traditional hard drive when the price moves out of the stratosphere,you can be sure there will be a market for it.

Most client systems are no longer limited by CPU performance. They are almost always limited by storage. Hard drives have access latency in milliseconds while SSDs run in hundreds of microseconds.

Recommendations

While it is not possible to recommend a drive for each user’s specific needs, there are some general considerations to keep in mind when purchasing an SSD. If you’re looking for an operating system drive, it would be nice to spend the extra money on a nice NVMe drive with a DRAM cache or even an HMB implementation. High-performance NVMe drives like the Samsung 970 EVO Plus (review here) are preferred. A good SATA SSD will also be sufficient for most users. In this category, you should avoid cheap drives without DRAM. If you want to store and play games from an SSD, it would be wise to look for larger capacity SATA SSDs rather than expensive NVMe or Gen 4 drives. Even a SATA SSD without DRAM can get the job done without a significant performance penalty. If endurance comes first.

Compared to 2,400 TBW in the 860 EVO, the Enterprise-class 860 PRO has 4,800 TBW – Image: Samsung

Final Words

SSDs have become an essential part of modern gaming or workstation systems. For the longest time, hard drives have been our primary source of data storage, but that has changed completely due to the development of fast and inexpensive flash drives. In 2020, it’s important to have at least some type of solid-state memory on your computer. By the end of the day, flash memory keeps getting cheaper and any type of SSD will be a big upgrade over a traditional hard drive.

Purchasing an SSD mainly depends on the specific use case of the buyer, and there are many options for everyone’s needs. If you just want to add a cheap high-capacity drive to your system to dump all your games on it, then even a cheap SATA SSD without DRAM will be fine for most users. Tests show that game load times do not differ significantly between low-end and high-end SSDs, but SSDs offer a huge leap over traditional hard drives.

If you are planning on making your SSD drive the primary drive of your operating system, it would be wise to invest a little more money in this component. Getting a faster SSD with good quality NAND Flash and built-in DRAM cache will not only improve performance, but also the endurance and reliability of the drive. This is crucial as the operating system drive must store the most important files on the computer.

In any case, the times of waiting for a cup of coffee while booting the operating system are long gone. SSDs have become a truly essential part of modern computers and are absolutely worth the hard drive investment.