Solid State Drives (SSD)

Solid State Drives are storage drives that do not contain any moving parts. There are many advantages to installing a solid state drive into your existing computer. However, there are a couple of disadvantages as well.

Traditional hard drives contain internal disks called platters that store data on various places on the platters. These platters are spun and read by heads (see image below). For many years, these hard drives have been used and they are very reliable for the most part. However, the emergence of solid state drives has revolutionized the hard drive industry.

Traditional HDD

Solid state drives are storage drives that do not contain any moving parts (see image below). If you're having trouble visualizing how a solid state drive works, just think about a flash drive. A flash drive does not contain any moving parts and the data is saved on the drive without the use of spinning platters and read/write heads. With that being said, the absence of spinning platters and read/write heads greatly speeds up the process of saving and retrieving data to and from the disk. Recently, I bought a new laptop and quickly swapped out the hard drive for an SSD. The amount of time it takes the computer to boot up has greatly been reduced with the new SSD. In fact, when I turn my computer on I'm up and running in a matter of seconds as opposed to minutes. This may not be a big deal for some but to me it's like a difference of night and day. 

SSD

In conclusion, solid state drives are a good investment for the computer user that needs more efficiency out of their computer. However, as of the writing of this blog they are a bit expensive and come in smaller storage sizes than traditional hard drives. If you can wait, it may be better to catch them on sale like I did. If you can catch them on sale, I think the increased efficiency and speed are definitely worth the price.