Almost ten years ago, a new Solid State Drive (SSD) digital storage device appeared on the market, which immediately established itself as a more reliable and faster alternative to the Hard Disk Drive (HDD). The rapid proliferation of SSD drives among ordinary users was complicated by the cost and low memory capacity of the devices. But with the development of technology, solid-state drives have become more affordable, more functional and are confidently replacing "classic" hard drives from personal computers and laptops.
The main differences between SSD and HDD
Without going into the technical part, we can highlight the main advantages of SSD drives:
-. Read and write operations on a solid state drive are tens, if not hundreds of times faster than on a hard drive. Hence, the minimum time for launching applications, opening files, speed of games and programs, stable browser operation. The most important advantage in favor of SSD.
-. There are moving parts in the construction of a hard disk, and everything that moves has a limited resource and is afraid of external vibrations and shocks.
-. An SSD drive is smaller in size than an HDD, especially for laptops.
-. Taking into account the read and write speed, more power is needed to rotate the metal discs in the HDD. Also relevant for laptops.
-. A minor factor, but the victory is for the SSD.
The only drawbacks to SSDs are cost and capacity. But this problem will be resolved over time.
An SSD is technically completely different from an HDD. Hence, habitual HDD handling can harm and reduce the lifespan of a solid state drive.
Defragmentation
Disk defragmentation is a special process aimed at optimizing and updating the logical structure of a device. The information is overwritten into a new sequence of clusters between which there are no gaps. Due to this, the speed of the system accessing data on the hard drive increases and free space is freed up.
It is not recommended to defragment an SSD drive with a regular Windows service or special programs. By virtue of their technological peculiarity, solid-state drives have a limited number of rewriting cycles, but when used correctly, their lifespan is significantly longer than classic hard drives. Windows 10 has a built-in system utility that optimizes the operation of SSD drives, in no case should you disable it.
For the sake of experiment, you can defragment the solid state drive once in the usual way. The difference in performance will not be noticeable. With HDD, the opposite is true; to find ordered clusters, fewer movements of the read head are required, respectively, higher performance. And in an SSD, information is read from any memory cell instantly.
Operating system
For highly efficient operation, SSD must be used in computers running Windows 10. An important feature of this operating system is the presence of the TRIM command. On previous versions of the OS, this command can also be present, with the exception of the oldest versions - Windows XP and Windows Vista. It is highly discouraged to forcibly disable the TRIM command.
The essence of the TRIM command is to completely delete files from the media, that is, the coordinates of the location are deleted and the data is erased from the memory cell. In the absence of this command, only the coordinates of the exact location of the file on the disk are deleted from the system. In the case of HDD, new information is recorded over the old one. And in the case of SSDs, the data is preliminarily deleted, and only then new ones are written, hence the decrease in system performance.
Executive commands and files
Operating systems use the free memory of hard drives to perform various operations, such as the paging file, placing temporary files, and many others. All of these commands are constantly writing and deleting information in the SSD cells.
This is at odds with the previous points, but on the other hand, it is these operations that affect the computer's performance. It is necessary to use high-quality solid-state drives from renowned manufacturers, as they are more resistant to such influences due to advanced technologies.
Information storage
Almost every computer user stores media collections of photos, videos, movies, and other data on their device. It makes sense to use a classic hard drive for these purposes, at least for economic reasons.
There is no need for quick access to such files. In addition, the playback speed of media files is the same for SSD and HDD, such as movies.
Full memory
It is not necessary to completely fill the memory of SSD drives. Due to its technical features, the write speed drops significantly on a disc that is completely filled with information. The optimal limit of the filled capacity can be considered 75% of the total volume, although on media with a capacity of a terabyte and above, this figure can be increased to 95%.
When the SSD is fully loaded, free space remains in partially filled blocks. At the next recording, the system must calculate these places and carry out a series of operations to retrieve and use free memory. Whereas on a partially filled disk there are free blocks and recording occurs at maximum speed.
