What Are Solid State Drives - SSD Facts You Should Know

Solid State Drives are types of hard drives which do not rely on magnetic media for their memory storage. Instead, they use semiconductors much like flash memory drives already do.

However, the main difference between the two is that the solid state drive is not used as an external memory storage system like flash drives. They are built to be installed internally in place of a traditional hard drive.

If you’re wondering why using SSD’s would be a good idea, there are several advantages being promoted by industry insiders. This is where most of the promises come into the picture.

Basically, these drives are considered great inventions because they are believed to deliver three amazing benefits: reduced power usage, faster access to memory, and improved reliability.

All of these benefits are a result of the differences in the way solid state drives and traditional hard drives work.

Most of us have at least a basic understanding when it comes to the question of how does a hard drive work.   Inside them are spinning magnetic platters where everything we do on our computers is saved.

To work though, they rely on drive motors to move them. If anything happens to those motors or to the drive heads, then our hard drive ceases to function correctly and we’ll end up shopping for a new laptop or desktop.

These alternative drives don’t have all of those extra parts. Everything is done through Flash memory chips and most of us know that the portable Flash memory we use in our cameras and other storage devices does a pretty good job of saving quickly and of working when we need it to.

As you can imagine, having a drive that uses less power, is less vulnerable to damage, and is able to retrieve data faster would be a dream for most Pc and laptop owners, but on the other side of the coin write speeds are not yet comparable to normal hard drives.

And of course this technology does come at a price which is not justifiable for many casual computer users.

Another consideration that needs to be taken into account is the very small size of these drives compared to traditional hard drive technology. Drives sizes at the higher end are adequate for basic users but if you store a lot of digital data for example music and film you will quickly use the available space.