For anyone who has not heard of or really don’t know much about solid state hard drives this is for you! First let me explain the differences between mechanical hard drives and solid state hard drives. One is really fast and rarely has a problem and the other is slow and can fail easier THAT’S IT! Not really that simple.
If you could open a mechanical hard drive and look inside you would see a silver round platter that spins as it works and a needle that goes back and forth as it searches for information. The needle and the disk look much like the old days when we had vinyl records and a needle that followed the groves to read information that in this example would be music. The needle in the hard drive does not actually touch the disk but uses a laser type system to read the information. Every time you make a request that laser needs to move and find the information. This takes power from the computer and although it is really pretty fast it is no solid state drive.
Mechanical hard drives usually spin at 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm. The higher spinning rate is faster, but not much. There have been books written about mechanical hard drives but I think this is enough to get my point across.
Solid state hard drives are exactly that “solid state” no moving parts. They also store information in a more efficient way. When you make a request the solid state hard drive is able to complete your request anywhere from 3 to 10 times as fast as the mechanical hard drive. The solid state drive also uses an algorithm that remembers the most common searches that you make. It actually learns something about the user and what kind of work the user searches for the most. Mechanical drives do the same thing but nowhere near as much or as fast as a solid state hard drive. Even 5 years ago solid state hard drives were a little too pricey for the average user. Today the cost has come down quite a bit. It all has to do with how much information the user needs to store. For quite awhile people thought they needed a terabyte size hard drive. Just so you know a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, and one gigabyte can store about 500 pictures. There are some people out there that download full length movies and do different things that require a lot of hard drive memory. In my repair business I find the average user that has had a terabyte size has used about 200 gigabytes in five tears of use. all of my reconditioned computer that I sell have solid state hard drives. Sizes are 128 GB-256 GB and all the way up to one terabyte. A 256 GB solid state hard drive costs about the sale as a 500 GB mechanical drive. If you need a lot of space just buy an external hard drive or store some stuff on the cloud. These days you can get 500 GB of cloud storage for $2 a month.
There are many different sizes and speeds that are offered, but if you are coming from a mechanical hard drive to a solid state hard drive you are going to be impressed with any of them.