Introduction

It is now almost impossible to be a gamer without having a decent set of high-performance SSDs. We had taken a look at the Kingston HyperX Savage 120GB SSD and this form factor had caught our attention for a few reasons. We did not know much about this type of drive and we had no data to back this assumption. Moreover, it had the added advantage of cost efficiency, as a few hundred bucks would buy you a really good HDD. You do not get SSD latency when it comes to HDD-based gaming, but we wanted to make the best of both the options. With this in mind, we thought about the various types of SSD and came up with this list. SSDs We will start with the most important type of SSD. This would include the solid-state drives which we have all grown up with over the years.

What is an SSD?

An SSD, short for Solid State Drive, is a fast type of hard drive that is only accessible via computer via the computer’s operating system. The problem is that normal hard drives are not fast enough to run Windows and many other programs that everyone wants. If you use a PC, laptop, or tablet, then you will most likely use a computer with a hard drive (known as a HDD). Traditional hard drives are faster than hard drives, but they are still much slower than a SSD. The capacity of an SSD is much smaller than that of a conventional hard drive, with the capacity being roughly equivalent to the size of a shoebox. SSDs are also much faster and are able to keep data much more reliably than a conventional hard drive.

What are the benefits of an SSD?

Freedom from heat Most modern hard drives (like the old 5400 series from Seagate, Crucial, etc.) use a rotating platter mechanism, which means that the platter/disk is rotated at 2,400 RPM, which in turn generates heat. This heat leads to the need for all hard drive to have a cooling fan, in order to provide cooling for the hard disk itself, and also to increase the life span of the drive (and hopefully extend it by a couple of years). This is not the case with solid state drives. With the solid state drives (SSDs), the platter/disk is much smaller in size, and so the drive will generate less heat, and there will be no need for a cooling fan. To quote Phil Soriano from Wirecutter: “The big plus with an SSD drive is that it’s more efficient, and generates far less heat.

How to choose the right SSD

Deciding on the best SSD isn’t easy, and the question of choosing between an SSD and a traditional hard drive (the latter offering a small amount of storage) is one that can come up time and time again. You should also know that an SSD is slightly faster than a regular hard drive. It has advantages in terms of system responsiveness, boot time, application launch time and general application and website performance. However, the performance increase isn’t huge. That being said, an SSD can have a substantial impact on your PC’s overall performance, and will likely have a considerable positive impact on the price of the drive over time. If you don’t have the budget to spend a small fortune on an SSD, then a traditional hard drive can still offer a great deal of storage.

Conclusion

Hard drive performance and performance-per-dollar has always been a little more of a mixed bag than SSD performance has been. SSD storage is often much faster (and much more cost-effective) than HDD storage, while hard drive performance can be faster than both SSD storage and solid-state storage in some cases. That’s why having an SSD and a HDD is sometimes the perfect storage solution for your computer, particularly if you plan to use hard drives for backups and other types of slower storage. However, HDD storage will be much cheaper than both SSD and HDD storage, especially compared to both spinning hard drives and solid state drives (SSD). If you have a limited budget, you should probably pick up a new hard drive that uses a SATA 3 connector for your computer.