Why You Need a Solid State Drive

May 19, 2014

SSDSolid state drives hit the scene a few years ago and took our industry by storm. Uber-fast and extremely reliable, the only downside of these drives to be found was the price. But luckily for lovers of all things fast and powerful like us, those prices have come down to affordable levels for the average consumer. There’s no denying now that solid state drives are the biggest advancement our industry has seen in the past few years. And here’s why.

Extreme Speed – Solid state drives deliver upwards of 500MBp/s read speeds – somewhere in the neighborhood of 5x-6x the performance of traditional 7,200 RPM drives even at their peak. So what does this mean? Well, programs installed on the SSD will launch quickly, files will copy at lightening speeds, multitasking will be vastly improved, and boot times will go down to under 10 seconds, depending on your OS. The performance difference is pretty remarkable overall. So much so, that we often recommend customers invest in a solid state drive before a top of the line CPU or more RAM, for overall better performance.

At the time of this writing, we use Samsung EVO 840 Series SSDs which boast some eye-popping specs, even for SSDs. Learn more about these drives here.

Better Reliability – Whereas traditional mechanical HDDs use a spinning disk to read and write data (the speed of which is noted in the drive specs, eg. 7200 RPM), solid state drives use a similar flash memory technology to USB thumb drives or MP3 players. Since SSDs do not have the moving parts of traditional HDDs, they are much less likely to fail catastrophically, meaning data loss is less of a concern. Additionally, due to the way that SSDs store information, they do not slow down as they begin to get full and do not require defragmentation, both huge negatives for traditional HDDs.

**Note – We get a lot of questions about the degradation of SSDs over time. While multiple redundancies did tend to cause performance degradation in first gen SSDs, modern SSDs can handle tens of thousands of read/write cycles before degrading, making it much less of a concern.

Whisper Quiet – A lack of moving parts means that the whirring and ticking associated with traditional HDDs are a thing of the past. SSDs are nearly silent, making them a great choice for the acoustically conscious customer.

So there you have it! Additional questions? Email our sales team at vmsales [at] velocitymicro [dot] com.

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Josh Covington

Josh has been with Velocity Micro since 2007 in various Marketing, PR, and Sales related roles. As the Director of Sales & Marketing, he is responsible for all Direct and Retail sales as well as Marketing activities. He enjoys Seinfeld reruns, the Atlanta Braves, and Beatles songs written by John, Paul, or George. Sorry, Ringo.