SSD quick purchase manual-15 Q&A
Solid-state drives (SSD) are nothing new these days. They have been gaining popularity in recent years.
(1) Why buy SSD?
In my opinion, except for its high price, SSDs are remarkable compared to mechanical hard disks. This section is written to reassure users who still have doubts about SSDs. If you already know and are determined to buy SSDS, you can ignore this section.
When buying a SSD, the first question is what makes SSDs better than mechanical drives? SSDs are better than mechanical drives because of their physical structure: they are small in size, light in weight, fast in speed, low in heat, strong in shock resistance, wide in temperature range and low in performance attenuation.
1. Q: What is the advantage of SSDs compared with HDDs?
A: fast, small and durable.
2. Q: SSDs just boot up fast?
A: Not only that, but SSDs run and install applications (including software, games, etc.) much faster than HDD. Simply put, you can feel the changes made by SSDs every time you use a computer.
3. Q: How much faster are solid-state drives than mechanical drives on earth?
A: SSDs are three to five times faster than HDD in speed of continuous read and write. SSDs are up to seven times faster in random read and write than HDD. For example, it takes half an hour to extract a large compressed newspaper file on a HDD while the SSD just take less than 10 minutes. It takes more than a minute to read the game on a mechanical hard drive while 20 seconds on a solid-state drive. You may don not feel the difference between SSD and HDD if not using SSD. But for SSD users, they express that it is hard to tolerate the slow speed of mechanical hard drives any more.
4. Q: What are the disadvantages of SSDs?
A: The only drawback is expensive. The unit price of solid-state disk is about 10 times that of the mechanical hard disk. At present, the mechanical hard disk is about 2TB=$70, while the solid-state disk is about 256GB=$100.
5. Q: Are SSDs less reliable?
A: A website has calculated the repair rate of storage products, and the result shows that the failure rate of SSD is lower than that of mechanical hard disk. Although there's no such thing as a 100% perfect electronics, the technology is so mature today that it is groundless to think that SSDS are unreliable and fail-safe.
(2) How to use SSD?
As a matter of fact, it is an old problem that SSD need to be set up. After 2008, most computers have SATA III interfaces, operating AHCI mode by default and 4K aligned when installed on Mac OSX or Windows 7/8/10. In other words, today's hardware and software are ready for SSDs. The one thing you have to do is install them.
6. Q: How exactly to use SSDs?
A: For 99% computers, SSD operate once installed on condition that PCs are produced within 5 years and operating system is Windows 7 or above.
(3) How to select SSDs?
In recent years, SSD has developed rapidly, and there are more than 100 manufacturers of SSD.
Every brand has several models and different capacities of SSD, which makes it tricky to select. So how do we choose?
7. Q: Which brand of SSD is good?
A: I personally think the current SSD brand classification is as follows:
Top brands: Samsung, Intel
Professional brands: Kingston, OCZ, Crucial and Plextone
Reliable brand: SanDisk /Toshiba/A-Data /Transcend/KINGTIGER/Kingshare/Galaxy.etc
Samsung and Intel are the most trusted SSD brands in the market.
The reasons for this ranking are as follows:
First, we need to understand the elements of a SSD. Solid state drive consists of memory chips, controllers, firmware and software. In addition, after-sales service, brand guarantee and other factors are need to be considered in the products. All of these factories are important when purchasing a solid state drive. Therefore, the rank is based on the hardware and software resources/technology, enterprise scale, market channels, after-sales service and other factors.
Samsung and Intel is the first choose for users who want to have extreme performance and complete guarantee while do not know much about SSDs and don not care about price. As the most upstream manufacturers, Samsung and Intel are lead in new technology and new production. Their products are the most advanced and excellent. At the same time, their strong corporate strength also ensures that users can enjoy the most adequate after-sale protection. Once the product goes wrong, you will get the best service. Although having strong technology and services, Intel does not sell well because of high prices.
If you want to strike a balance between price and quality, products of professional storage brand is worth of consideration because the user experience they bringing is not much different from first class manufacture. The difference between them is reflected in the level of industry status and core technology mastery.
Relatively speaking, most users will choose the quasi-first line products. With strong technical strength, enterprise scale and guaranteed after-sales service, they are also experts in storage products. Even, sometimes quasi- first line brand products are more aggressive in design and may be more powerful in performance.
Conclusion: Buying the top brand such as Samsung and Intel if you have enough money. Choosing the professional brands if you pay more attention to the price.
8. Q: What's the difference between expensive and cheap SSD? Is the expensive SSD better?
A: The price of SSD varies greatly among different brands/models. Take 120-128GB capacity as an example, the cheapest SSD is less than $40, while the most expensive SSD is more than $200. They use different chip levels, different materials, different development and design costs, provide software support, after-sales service is different.
9. Q: What interfaces do SSDs have today? What are the differences between SSDs with different interfaces?
A: At present, the most common interface of SSD is SATA III, mSATA, M. 2and PCIe. Among them SATA interface is the most mainstream interface, usually used in desktop and notebook. It is required to check specifications of notebook before select which interface to buy. Especially for laptop, the type and number of interfaces are considered. The PCIe interface is only used on desktop, with faster speed, and is typically designed for fever players or enterprise users.
10. Q: How much storage capacity should I buy?
A: It depends on your daily usage and budget. I think 240-256GB is the best option. In addition to the operating system and the necessary common software, but also it can install some often played games or large software. If money is really tight and needs of hard disk space are not so big, 120-128GB is ok. For more budget-friendly users, 480-512GB or more with multiple hard drives is no problem. Currently, SSD is usually used as the system disk coordinated with large capacity HDD as memory disc to place games, movies, audio files, etc. For laptop users, you need to consider the number of hard disk bits. If there is only one hard disk bit, it is better to have 240-256GB of capacity, while 120-128GB is probably not enough.In addition, the price and performance ratio of 240-256GB is higher. It is not much more expensive than 120-128GB, but the capacity is twice.
(4) Additional questions regarding SSDs
11. Q: Why is the capacity of SSDS different? Like 120/128gb, 240/250/256gb?
A: Due to the different design of the controller or for reasons of chip features, some part of space will be used as redundancy to guarantee speed and the useful lifespan, so the actual available space will have some different, such as 120 or 128 gb, 240, 250, 256 gb, the difference between them is capacity, features, performance, quality no inevitable relation, don't have to struggle with it.
12. Q: Is the larger capacity SSD the better?
A: it is no problem that choosing SSD with larger capacity among several choice. But the redundancy is required to notice among SDDs with same capacity.
Because flash memory has a read and write life, data can go wrong after SSDS are used for a long time. In order to ensure data security, many manufacturers leave a certain amount of white space redundancy in SSDs so that data can be read and write normally in the case of local SSD errors. These redundant spaces, which are not normally available, can save data at critical times. Therefore, redundancy is considered when the capacity is the same. The greater the redundancy is, the stronger the fault tolerance of SSD will be and the higher the data security will be.
13. Q: Does downloading destroy the SSD?
A: as long as it is used, it will definitely consume the hard disk. In the current situation, the normal downloading and use of the average user does not have much impact on the service life of the hard disk. There is no need to worry about it.
14. Q: Is it necessary to maintain the SSD regularly?
A: almost no, the current SSD firmware has A defragmenting and cleaning mechanism for the hard disk itself. In addition, due to different physical structures, even if A large number of small files are accumulated over A long period of time, the speed of the hard disk will not be significantly reduced. Under normal circumstances, the use of 2, 3 years or longer performance will not have much decline, if there are unknown factors performance significantly decline, can be a complete physical erase operation, (need to pay attention to such operations should not be carried out frequently, will significantly reduce the life of the hard disk! Please use software tools or general tools attached to the hard disk for operation.) in addition, no manual maintenance is required.
15. Q: Can SSDs be used as portable drives?
A: Absolutely. The SATA solid state drive can be used as a removable hard drive in a removable hard drive box just like a 2.5-inch hard drive. There are also removable drives made directly from solid-state drives.