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Avast Academy Performance Hardware What is a Solid-State Drive (SSD)?

H A R D W A R E

What is a Solid-State Drive

(SSD)?
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a new generation of storage device used in
computers. SSDs use flash-based memory, which is much faster than
a traditional mechanical hard disk. Upgrading to an SSD is one of the
best ways to speed up your computer. Learn how SSDs work and how
to keep them optimized with a specialized performance-boosting tool.

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What is a solid-state drive?
For decades, data was stored primarily on mechanical hard drives. These traditional
hard disk drives (HDDs) are mostly based on moving parts, like a read/write head
that goes back and forth to gather data. This makes HDDs the likeliest computer
hardware component to fail.

This article contains:

What is a solid-state drive?

What are solid-state drives used for?

 What are the different types of SSDs

Get the best performance from your SSD

The new solid-state drives work completely differently. They use a simple memory
chip called NAND flash memory, which has no moving parts and near-instant access
times.

Early experiments with SSD-like technology started in the 1950s, and by the 1970s
and 1980s they were being used in high-end supercomputers. However, the
technology was extremely expensive, and the storage capacity was small (2MB-
20MBs) compared to the ludicrous 5-digit prices. SSD technology was used
occasionally in the military and aerospace sectors, but it wouldn’t be used in
consumer devices until the 1990s .

In the early 1990s, hardware innovations caused SSD prices to drop. However, the
lifespan and size were still an issue: An SSD had a lifespan of roughly 10 years. It
wouldn’t be until the late 2000s that SSDs would start to become more reliable and
to provide decades of continuous usage at acceptable access speeds.

The memory chips on an SSD are comparable to random access memory (RAM).
Instead of a magnetic platter, files are saved on a grid of NAND flash cells. Each grid
(also called blocks) can store between 256 KB and 4MB. The controller of an SSD
has the exact address of the blocks, so that when your PC requests a file it is (almost)
instantly available. There’s no waiting for a read/write head to find the information it
needs. SSD access times are thus measured in nanoseconds.

Note that the era of traditional hard disk drives is far from over. Shipments of SSDs
are not expected to overtake HDDs until 2021. Among our own Avast users, a vast
majority still have old-school mechanical drives.

What are solid-state drives used for?

SSD adoption began in high-performance technology areas and in enthusiasts’ PCs,
where the drives’ extremely low access times and high throughput justified the
higher cost. But they have since become an accepted option -- or even the default
choice -- in lower-cost mainstream laptops and PCs.

SSDs have specific benefits in the following areas:

Business: Companies working with huge amounts of data (such as

programming environments or data analysis) often rely on SSDs, as access
times and file-transfer speeds are critical.

Gaming: Gaming computers have always pressed the limits of current

computing technology, justifying relatively expensive equipment for the
benefit of gaming performance. That is particularly true for storage, as modern
blockbuster games constantly load and write files (e.g. textures, maps, levels,
characters).

Mobility: SSDs have low power requirements, thus contributing to better

battery life in laptops and tablets. SSDs are also shock resistant, which
reduces the chances of data loss when mobile devices are dropped.

Servers: Enterprise servers need SSDs to get fast reads and writes in order to
properly serve their client PCs.

To get a more comprehensive view of why it makes sense to get an SSD over a HDD,
check out this article.

What are the different types of SSDs

When you shop for an SSD, you’ll encounter a number of different terms such as
mSATA or PCIe. So what does it all mean? Here’s a primer on what you need to know.

To attach an SSD to your system, you need to connect it using a specific interface.
Common interfaces are:

PCIe and NVMe SSDs: PCI Express (PCIe) is normally used to connect
graphics cards, network cards, or other high-performance peripherals. This
interface gives you high bandwidth and low latency, making it ideal when you
need blazing-fast communication between the SSD and your CPU/RAM. SSDs
 that use this connection type are based on the Nonvolatile Memory Express
standard (NVMe), which offers higher input output per second (IOPS) and
even lower latency than SATA (which we’ll get to in a moment). NVMe boasts

up to 16 GBits per second of raw throughput which, thanks to multiple parallel

channels, runs at up to 4,000 MB per second.

mSATA III, SATA III, and traditional SSDs: Serial Advanced Technology
Attachment (SATA) is an older interface that was designed specifically for
storage, with speeds up to 6 GBit/s or about 600 MB per second. SATA is
slowly being phased out by NVME, which is significantly faster. However, older
PCs or laptops with a hard disk drive would still benefit from an upgrade to a
SATA-based SSD.

SSDs are available in all sorts of storage capacity starting at around 32 GB and
SSDs are available in all sorts of storage capacity, starting at around 32 GB and
ranging up to 5 TB in the consumer space. (Of course, capacity is significantly higher
for enterprise grade storage, with commensurately higher prices.)

During the short-lived era of netbooks (remember those? They were cheap, but slow
and flimsy), the famous Asus Eee PC series used 1-4 GB of SSDs as storage, from
which parts of the operating system were run for faster access. This was the first
mainstream use of SSDs. From then on, ultrabooks and eventually desktop PCs
started to adopt SSDs. Common sizes today are between 250 GB and 500 GB,
which is plenty of space to hold your Windows operating system, the most common
programs, and a lot of your personal files.

Get the best performance from your

SSD
No matter how much money you spend, the hard disk is by far the slowest part of any
computer system. Even a SATA SSD with 600 MB is slow compared to other
hardware components, which may be capable of transferring 20-30 Gigabytes per
second.

As a result, a faster NVMe SSD is probably the best investment for a new computer
and a great upgrade to speed up your PC or your Mac.

To demonstrate the difference in speed, we upgraded a 6-year-old gaming PC by

replacing its HDD with a SATA SSD, and we performed a series of tests. The results
are astounding:

Boot time

Before: 79 seconds

After: 17 seconds

Gaming loading time (GTA V)

Before: 133 seconds

After: 25 seconds
 But even SSDs need maintenance. If you have the equipment, you might as well get
the best performance from it!

Our first performance tip is to never use a traditional defragmentation tool on an

SSD; it’s not required and could actually be harmful.

Our second tip is to use TRIM to ensure your SSD runs fast. TRIM is a command that
tells your SSD which data blocks can be erased after being used, thus improving
performance and extending its lifespan. TRIM can be performed quite easily using
the Defrag tool built into Avast Cleanup, which you can try for free.

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Free Trial

Get it for
Android,
Mac

by
Sandro Villinger on
September 26, 2019

Updated on
November 24,
2021

WINDOWS
MAC

DESKTOP

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SD DOWNLOAD
erformance FREE TRIAL
erformance FREE TRIAL

ast Cleanup for

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eeds up
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tends the
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