![]() ![]() That means you could very reasonably expect a PCIe 5.0 SSD to have transfer speeds of 13, 14, or even 15 gigabytes per second. Newer PCIe standards, like PCIe 5.0, are even faster - historically, each new standard has doubled the speed of the previous generation. RELATED: Why Are the PCI Express Ports on My Motherboard Different Sizes? x16, x8, x4, and x1 Explained Most NVMe SSDs out there utilize a special M.2 slot to connect to your computer, but some of them use a conventional PCIe port. Some PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives have read speeds of very nearly 7 gigabytes per second - more than ten times faster than SATA 3. There are multiple versions of the PCIe interface out there, but at the time of writing, PCIe 4.0 interfaces are the most common. NVMe SSDs use the PCI Express (PCIe) interface to exchange information with your computer. They connect to your motherboard via a SATA port. They have a maximum theoretical speed of about 600 megabytes per second. SATA SSDs use SATA 3 to interface with your computer. NAND memory also provides a significant increase in speed over mechanical hard drives, as the time wasted spinning up and seeking is removed from the equation. The vast majority of SSDs on the market are of the NAND variety, a type of non-volatile memory that doesn’t require electricity to maintain data storage capacity (unlike the RAM in your computer, which loses its stored data as soon as the power goes off). Although the scale is different and the size of the storage significantly larger, an SSD shares so much more in common with a simple, portable flash drive than it does with a mechanical HDD (and certainly far more than it ever would with a record player!). Solid State Drives, by contrast, have no moving parts. It’s as much a mechanical process as it is a digital one. ![]() When you want to write or read data from a magnetic HDD, the platters spin, the head seeks, and the data is located. It is, of course, quite a bit more complicated than that, but suffice to say that the analogy of an automatic record player arm seeking out a track on a record is not far flung from the actuator arm and head of a HDD seeking out data. Data is stored by changing the polarity of the magnetic bits on the surface of the platters. The surface of the magnetic platters is written to by a tiny little mechanical arm (the actuator arm) with a very fine tip (the head). Those platters spin on a spindle (much like a record spins on a turn table). An HDD is, at its most simple, a set of metal platters coated with a ferromagnetic material. So what exactly is a Solid State Drive? First let’s go over what a traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is. Throughout the 2000s, the price of flash memory continued to fall, and by the end of the decade, consumer Solid State Drives were making inroads in the personal computer market. In the 1990s, Flash-based SSDs made an appearance but were still far too expensive for the consumer market and made hardly a blip outside of specialized computing circles. The earliest were RAM-based and were so cost-prohibitive as to make appearances only in ultra high-end and super computers. SSDs have been around for decades in various forms. This might be hard to believe, but Solid State Drives are actually fairly old technology. What is an SSD? In what ways do you benefit the most from paying the premium for an SSD? What, if anything, do you need to do differently with an SSD? Read on as we cut through haze surrounding Solid State Drives. They’ve also shown a dramatic decrease in price, even though they’re still costlier than traditional drives per gigabyte of storage. The last few years have seen a marked increase in the availability of SSDs. But are they a good match for you? Read on as we demystify SSDs. Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the lighting fast counterpart to the traditional hard drive with moving parts.
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