Factors To Consider While Buying An SSD

buying an SSD
An SSD (Solid State Drive) is an alternative to the traditional HDD (Hard Drive Disk) that’s been the mainstream storage methods for years. This can be used for both desktop computer and laptop. There isa number of factors that are to be considered while buying an SSD.
There’s a huge different between SSD and HHD like the SSDs have no moving parts whereas the HHDs have. HDDs have spinning disks inside them along with moving parts. This is the reason why HDDs are much slower than SSDs and the read/write speed is lower. Since the SSDs are faster than HDDs, they result in being a lot more expensive.
Now let’s go into the factors to be considered while buying an SSD.

1. Specifications:

buying an SSD

Potential incompatibilities are the first thing to look for while buying an SSD (or any hardware). There are some key specs that are pretty standardized for selecting an SSD.

  • Form Factor is one of the specifications which in modern hard drives is 2.5 inches. This is a standard size for laptop HDDs which isn’t suitable for desktop computers. They usually require 3.5 inches form factor.
  • An SSD with 2.5 inches form factor will never fit right into your laptop. The thickness or the z-height must be small enough for your laptop body. The z-height should be typically 9.5mm or 7mm for a moderate SSD.
  • All the consumer-grade SSDs have a Serial ATA (SATA) interface. Although whether you should get a 3 Gbps SATA or 6 Gbps SATA will depend on your computer handling speed. Nowadays 6 Gbps drives are more common. But 3Gbps are often cheaper if you can find them.
  • One benefit of an SSD over an HDD is that SSDs operate silently because they lack mechanical parts. If you want to move past the buzzing of an HDD as it spins up and the chatter as it looks for files, then go for the SSD.

2. Drive Capacity:

Because of the price of the SSDs, customers are preferring low storage drives. The low storage SSDs are called as “Boot drive”. A boot drive holds your operating system. If you were to install Windows on an SSD, it would make your computer boot much faster regardless of the rest of your tech specs. You can put some commonly-used programs and games on there.

How much can you go on an SSD without a separate storage drive depends on how much you’re willing to spend? Here are the usual capacities and what you can expect storage-wise at each range:

  • 32 GB: Good for an OS installation along with some programs. Not so much of media and games can be supported.
  • 64 GB: Great for an OS installation and should reasonably hold all your programs. Media and games remain incredibly limited here.
  • 120 GB: Great for an OS installation and better for media and games. Should hold at least some of your favorite gaming titles for uber-fast loading times.
  • 240 GB: Great for an OS installation and nice enough for media and games. You can’t put your whole movie collection and all your games here. But the storage won’t go short that early.
  • 480+ GB: Great for OS installation; great for media and games. While it’s true that you aren’t getting nearly as much storage for your money as you would get with a hard drive. You are getting raw speed which can make all the difference.

3. Read/ Write Speed:

Read/write speed is one of the technical aspects while buying an SSD. But their performances are measured by the metric. Essentially, this is the rate at which it reads and writes data. Faster loading times for games and programs refers to a high read speed. The Operating System also leads to super-fast boot times. Whereas a high write speed makes tasks like uncompressing files work much faster.
It’s known that all SSDs are faster than HDDs. So obviously, they aren’t all operating at the same read/write speeds. Modern SSDs, generally, operate in the range of 500 MB/s and higher, whereas cheaper and older SSDs naturally fall much shorter.

4. SATA 3 Support:

Most of the SSDs use SATA interface to transfer data. The speed difference on the before versions os SATA, i.e., SATA 1, 2 and 3 is noticeable. The data transfer of SATA 1, 2 and 3 are 1.5 Gbps, 3.0 Gbps, and 6 Gbps respectively. But not all the SSDs are compatible with all these SATA versions. It can clearlybe said that the SSDs connecting using SATA 3 can transfer data at double the rate of SATA 2. Anyhow, we look for transferring data at extremely high speeds. So a new motherboard with SATA 3 interface is the best that the SSD supports its interface. This is because you won’t get the most of your drive if the computer isn’t compatible.

5. Drive Manufacturer:

buying an SSD

There are some reputed and trusted brands like Samsung, Crucial or Sandisk which can be selected as the best choices for SSDs. SSDs have plenty of benefits over the regular hard disks, but many people swipe it away from using them as they are expensive. So you should be cautious of the manufacturer of the SSDs. You should avoid buying from an unknown manufacturer and also an unmarked SSD should be avoided.
These are some of the main factors to be considered while buying an SSD.
There might be even more factors and considerations among which these are the most followed.
Usually, any devices’ first considerations will be specifications, memory capacity, Operating System, the speed of OS, and much more. All these have been explainedin terms of an SSD.

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