Solid state storage drives, or SSDs, have been around for a long time, although when they hit the market they were infinitely more expensive than at the moment. They have become essential and are usually the primary units chosen in most systems for gaming, even many users prefer to lower the rest of the components a little to install one of these units.
Why are SSDs so important today?
Hard drives have long been established as drives to store different data and to keep us for a long time. Mechanical hard drives have been the kings for many years, but these, despite their large storage capacity, have a big problem, they are slow and cause the equipment to perform quite poorly. One of the problems is the latency, which in an HDD is 4.17ms, while the average speed, usually oscillates between 100-150MB / s. Because they are slow, the tasks of loading the operating system, loading a game, or transferring a file become very slow.
On the other hand, solid state drives or SSDs are much faster, as they do not have mechanical elements. The latency of an SSD is 2ms on average, which is half that of a HDD, while the speed of these units is around 550MB / s, which is between three and six times faster than an HDD. This allows you to reduce significantly, load games or the operating system, open the browser or install software.
These are SSDs, but NVMe SSDs go a lot further, since they can greatly improve read and write times, as well as latency. These NVMe SSDs, which are normally connected to the motherboard via the M.2 port, offer a latency of 0.2ms, which is ten times faster than an SSD and the speed can go up to 1.900MB / s, which is which is up to four times faster than an SSD.
Speed is not everything. SSDs have other advantages over HDDs. The solid state hard drive is very resistant to shocks, while the HDD is very weak to shocks, due to the mechanical parts. It is not the only advantage of a solid state disk since, in addition, they hardly generate heat, they are completely silent and the electrical consumption is less than that of an HDD. Space is also an element to take into account, since the SSD is usually 2.5 ", while an HDD is 3.5". SSDs also gain in weight, much lighter than HDDs.
We emphasized that SSDs are more resistant, because they do not have moving parts, something important, since it reduces the failure rate. In addition, the useful life is increasingly higher than SSDs, allowing to have a life as long or longer than an HDD, since mechanical hard drives have against moving parts, which suffer wear.
These solid state hard drives have not only become a fundamental part of any system worth its salt, they also involve elements that streamline tasks, such as loading the operating system, installing software, loading games, transferring files. , among others. It is not that it will allow us more powerful games, since that is what the graphics card takes care of, but it helps with other tasks, which are not usually given importance.
Hopefully the GB/dollar price of SSDs will go down, but we'll probably have to wait at least 3 or 5 more years.