In recent years, a new type has appeared on the electronics market and is gaining more and more popularity hard disk- SSD drive. Many people are interested in the question: “What is an SSD and is it needed?”. Today, almost everyone is familiar with flash drives, the convenience of which lies in their small size and speed. So, an SSD drive is, one might say, the same flash card, only it is connected to the computer in a different way.

Differences between SSD and HDD

In fact, these are two absolutely different devices that have nothing in common except for their purpose - both the first and second types are designed to store information.

The main differences are as follows:

• HDD is a magnetic disk, the main component of which is several magnetic platters;
• SSD is a set of chips and microchips;
• HDD is an electronic-mechanical device;
• SSD is a purely electronic device;
• The history of HDD usage spans over 60 years;
• SSD has been in use for no more than 10 years.

Pros and cons of SSD

Like any other SSD device, it has its own advantages and disadvantages from which even the most advanced products cannot get away. Let's start with the good. Indisputable pluses SSD systems are:

Speed. It is for this characteristic that SSDs have received tremendous support from customers. Even the cheapest and slowest SSD will work several times faster than the most “fancy” magnetic disk. The difference is noticeable from the very beginning. Loading the system and applications at a faster speed, as well as copying and moving the same file to the SSD will take less time than to the HDD;

Silence. Surely many PC users with magnetic hard disks have heard more than once how their hard disk starts up, especially if there are several of these disks installed on the same machine. Some discs even made creaking and crackling sounds, which distracted from work, and very irritable people, to say bluntly, “pissed off”. All this is in the past! Have you ever heard how a USB stick works? The SSD is definitely no louder.

Strength and stability. With the connected SSD, you can perform various manipulations - shake it, drop it on the floor, knock, but it will still work;

Weight. This may not be a plus, but SSDs are much lighter than their magnetic counterparts.

Dimensions. For a PC, it is not so important what size the hard drive will be, but for portable devices dimensions are of great importance, and in this regard, SSDs greatly outperform HDDs;

Energy consumption. The undoubted plus of these drives is their low power consumption. Those users who changed the HDD to SSD on their laptops noticed how the duration of the laptop's work without charging increased by an hour on average.

Now let's turn to disadvantages ... There are fewer of them than advantages, but still they are:

Limitation. SSDs have a rewrite cycle limit of 10 to 100 thousand times. But in fact, this is not a little and will be enough for at least several years, if every day, to disk to record in volumes of several GB. Therefore, you should not pay much attention to this. You do not count how many times you have written down and formatted a USB flash drive, but it also has a certain number of rewriting cycles;

The complexity of recovering lost information. Most often this occurs when power surges in the network, which can disable various devices, including a hard drive, and recovering lost information from an SSD will be much more difficult compared to.

Cost. Since SSDs went on sale, their cost has dropped significantly, but even now the gap between their cost and magnetic disks is more than obvious. And for many such discs are simply too expensive. But do not despair, prices for electronics tend to "fall" and the time when SSD-drives become affordable is not far off.

How important is an SSD drive?

The need to create a new type of disks arose at a time when the speed of other devices, such as the processor and RAM, became much faster. And a situation arose when a system that was not designed for those speeds that modern cars develop. It is the speed of work that necessitates a new type of hard disk.

Where is the use of SSD justified?

At present, the use of such disks for storing information will not be justified. Firstly, due to the complexity of recovering lost files, and secondly, due to the high cost of the device itself. Therefore, a combination of SSD and HDD is used for personal purposes. The OS and programs are put on the first one (to speed up the performance), the second one stores the information necessary for the user. The result is incredible PC performance and maximum reliability of your valuable information.

Although it should be noted that storage systems on SSD appear. Same with popular hosting you can find tariffs with hybrid and SSD storage drives. Will wait!

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Malfunctions hard drives(part 1)

It has been a long time since the introduction of Solid State Drives (SSDs) on the market. Prices for this product are systematically decreasing, making it more and more affordable, and now a 120 GB drive will cost about 4 thousand rubles. In fact, if you are looking to upgrade your PC now, buying an SSD is going to be one of the most cost-effective options available. You do not have to throw away your existing hard drive (it will only partially change its function, becoming a storage for media and other heavy files), and the performance of your computer in almost all modes of operation will noticeably increase.

Users who are not particularly interested in the world of iron may not quite clearly understand the fundamental difference between SSD and the usual magnetic hard HDD disk, and often they see the novelty as the same HDD, only faster, smaller, lighter and more expensive. It is the lack of understanding of the fundamental differences in HDD operation and SSD can lead to incorrect use of the SSD, which in especially difficult cases will reduce all its advantages to zero. Yes, you need to use a solid-state drive correctly, but do not be afraid - the user does not require any painstaking daily deep technical actions. Rather, it is required to simply not do a few simple things, and today we present a list of "not" for anyone who decides to screw up their workhorse with a nimble SSD.

The techies who discerned the captaincy here, we ask you to take into account the fact that if you know all this, then you probably know the fact that there are other people who may not know all this. Replace the usual "thank you cap" with your additional advice, together we will make the Internet more useful.

Don't defragment

No need to defragment your SSD. If in old Windows with FAT32 you defragmented by inertia (although the same NTFS feels great without it), then with the acquisition of an SSD, defragmentation (the SSD itself) can and should be forgotten altogether.

SSDs have a limited number of write cycles (as a rule, the cheaper the disk, the less resource it has), and such shoveling of its contents will definitely not benefit the life. Yes, recent SSD models have a very large supply of write cycles, and you are unlikely to reach the limit when the disk stops working correctly, even with frequent writes, but here the point is rather that defragmentation itself is meaningless for an SSD.

The HDD uses mechanical parts. The head that reads the data wanders back and forth on the surface of the magnetic disk. Accordingly, the more specific data is scattered across the disk, the more movements and time it needs to fully read this data. Nothing moves in the SSD, and access to any memory cell is carried out equally quickly and does not depend in any way on the relative position of this data.

Do not format

We are used to the fact that in order to completely and permanently delete data from the HDD, it is necessary to use additional tools: formatting, special utilities like DBAN or Wiper tool included in CCleaner. This is done to prevent a cunning attacker from recovering the data you deleted from the disk using a utility like Recuva.

In the case of SSDs, everything is different. It's not even about the drive itself, but about operating system... If you are using a more or less current OS (Windows 7+, Mac OS X 10.6.8+, Linux with Linux kernel 2.6.28+), then the system takes over the final deletion of data from the disk, and it does it automatically using the TRIM function.

TRIM implements the ability for the OS to "inform" the solid-state drive that the file has been completely deleted and the sectors occupied by it need to be cleared. Some of the earliest SSDs did not support TRIM, but it was so long ago (and these SSDs were so expensive) that the chances of hitting such a drive model tend to zero.

Don't use Windows XP and Windows Vista

For a new toy - a new OS! And the point here is not at all new. It's just that XP and Vista don't support TRIM. In the previous paragraph, we gave the concept of TRIM, and now we need to explain how the absence of this function affects the SSD. If there is no TRIM, then after deleting the file, the data will still remain on the disk. As a result, when information is written to the same sectors again, you will first have to clear them, and only then write data to them. Unnecessary untimely operations -> speed reduction.

TRIM is enabled by default on modern operating systems. The user doesn't have to do anything. Just leave it as it is and enjoy the SSD speeds.

Don't hammer to failure

In order for an SSD to run at full speed, it needs to maintain approximately 25% free space on it. It sounds a little dishonest: you buy an expensive SSD, there is so little space in it, the system sees less space in it than is written on the box, and then they also ask you to leave a quarter of the volume in reserve? Unfortunately yes. This is a feature SSD work, and so far we do not have the best widely available technologies. We'll have to accept the rules for the best speed.

From the point of view of internal processes, the drop in performance with a small amount of free space is explained as follows: a lot of free space - a lot of free blocks. When writing a file, data is written to free blocks. Low free space - many partially filled blocks and few completely free blocks. When writing a file, the system will first have to read the partially filled block into the cache, add new data to it, and then write the already modified block back to disk. And so for each block.

The 25% limit is not off the mark. This indicator was reached by the guys from AnandTech, who conducted research on the dependence of SSD performance on its fullness.

In fact, if you use the SSD where it is strongest, then leaving a quarter of the space free will not bother you. Now we are just going to talk about in which role the SSD is most effective.

Do not use as storage

Buying an SSD to store your music and movie library is a bad idea. HDD speeds are quite enough to comfortably record and watch FullHD movies and listen to Losless music. An SSD is needed where access and write speed is most important.

The SSD must be used as a system drive. It should have an operating system, applications and, if urgently needed, modern games. Nothing more.

Realizing that SSD ideally serves as a catalyst for the most demanding processes for fast computer operation (OS operation is the basis of everything and everything, fast operation of important applications, fast data reading from the "body" of the game), there is no need to hammer it to failure at all. An SSD is a dedicated fast lane for only the essentials.

If you still want to use fast SSD as a storage, then just calculate the cost of rubles per gigabyte of memory for it and for the HDD.

What if you bought a new fancy ultrabook, in which there is only an SSD, and you want to record movies? Buy an external hard drive with a USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt interface (provided that this standard is supported by the beech itself).

Hope that this information helps you get started using your SSD for its intended purpose and as efficiently as possible.

Now the main distinctive features a fast computer is a powerful processor, a large random access memory and solid state drive. Nevertheless, many users, when selecting components for their new computer, find it difficult to choose: is it worth buying an SSD drive or is it still worth taking a regular HDD? A vivid example from life: one of my friends has a firm and System Administrator ordered a batch of computers, replacing the classic hard drive with a solid-state SSD. The question arose - did the sysadmin make the right choice in this situation ?!

Yes! The choice was made correctly and now I will explain why.

What is an SSD ?!

In simple and understandable language for an ordinary user, a typical SSD disk is essentially a large-capacity flash drive using non-volatile NAND memory modules and connected via a high-speed SATA or PCE-Express interface.

Here are the main comparative characteristics SSD and classic hard drive:

Briefly summarizing the table, the SSD is light, fast, with little consumption, but at the same time it is expensive and still has a smaller volume for a reasonable price.

Does it make sense to buy an SSD ?!

To give an exact answer to this, you first need to decide what the user wants to get from the purchase ?!

Amount of information. The fact that now, at the price of a solid-state drive with a volume of 240-260 Gigabytes, you can buy a regular hard drive for 1-2 Terabytes gives particular relevance to the topic. But do you need such a volume for a computer or laptop now? For an office PC, where work is mainly done with documents and projects, and everything important is stored on network drive, Terabytes are not needed in principle. Speed ​​is more important there.

For home use usually they buy two devices at once: an SSD disk for use as a system disk, and a separate large-volume hard disk for file storage. Instead of the latter, removable external hard drives connected via USB are now often used. This option is especially relevant for a laptop. And if we take into account that the era of cloud storage has come, then there is simply no point in storing such volumes of information on your PC or laptop.

The speed of working with data. Now let's talk about speed separately. Due to the use of a solid-state drive, your laptop or computer will load the operating system in a few seconds, launch programs and applications much faster, saving files and projects will be performed instantly!

SSD for gaming. But do not expect that the use of SSD-drive will make games "fly", as many novice users think. Using it will not increase the number of FPS in the game and the quality of the graphics will not improve. He is not able to influence this in absolutely any way! Network games will not accelerate either, since the speed there depends mainly on the Internet access channel. But cached files and data stored locally will be loaded much faster.

Reliability... Some time ago, solid-state devices were considered unreliable and there was information that they quickly fail, literally just after fulfilling the warranty period. Now the situation has changed for the better! SSD failures are much less common than failures with conventional hard drives. But the nature of these failures is much more insidious due to the fact that the SSD has a much higher number of unrecoverable errors and the data is practically impossible to recover in the future. By the way, these errors practically do not depend on the number of read and write cycles, which used to frighten users. In practice, I have never yet come across a disk that has run out of cycles. So we can assume that they are quite reliable.

Summary

So, if you have not yet decided for yourself whether to buy an SSD or not, then my verdict is unambiguous - it's worth it. These devices are fast and reliable, and the volume of 240-520 GB, in principle, is enough for any task. Yes, a little expensive, but the effect on the face! The future belongs to them. The era of conventional hard drives is gradually passing and the day is not far off when they will simply cease to be produced!

If your computer has an SSD, you should use a modern operating system. In particular, you don't need to use Windows XP or Windows Vista... Both of these operating systems do not support the TRIM command. Thus, when you delete a file in the old operating system, it cannot send this command to the solid-state disk and, thus, the data remains on it (further depends on the controller, but in general it is not very good).

Don't fill the SSD completely

It is necessary to leave free space on the solid-state disk, otherwise, the write speed on it may drop significantly. It may seem strange, but in fact, the explanation is quite simple. When there is enough free space on the SSD, the solid state drive uses the free blocks to write new information. Ideally, download the official utility from the SSD manufacturer and see how much space it offers to reserve, usually this feature is present in these programs (it can be called Over Provisioning). On some disks, this reserved space is present by default and can be seen in management Windows disks as an unallocated area.

When an SSD is low on free space, there are many partially filled blocks on it. In this case, when writing, it first reads a certain partially filled block of memory into the cache, changes it, and overwrites the block back to disk. This happens with every block of solid state drive information that needs to be used to write a file.

In other words, writing to an empty block is very fast, writing to a partially filled one requires many auxiliary operations to be performed, and therefore is slow. Earlier tests showed that you should use about 75% of the SSD's capacity for the perfect balance between performance and the amount of information stored. For modern SSDs with large capacities, this may be overkill.

Limit writing to SSD. Or not worth it.

Perhaps the most controversial point, and today, in 2019, I cannot be as categorical as when I originally prepared this material more than 5 years ago. In fact, SSDs are purchased to increase the speed of work and a wide variety of operations, and therefore moving temporary files, the paging file, disabling indexing services and the like, although they really will reduce the wear and tear of the SSD, but, at the same time, will reduce the benefit from it.

Given the fact that today's solid state drives are generally relatively tenacious, I probably would not forcefully disable system files and functions, transfer service files from SSD to HDD. Except for one situation: if you have the cheapest 60-128 GB disk from an unknown Chinese manufacturer with a very low TBW recording resource (there are more and more of these lately, despite the general increase in the service life for popular brands).

Don't store large files that don't need fast access on an SSD

This is a fairly obvious point: your collection of films, photos and other media materials and archives is usually not required. high speed access. SSDs are smaller and more expensive per gigabyte than conventional hard drives. On an SSD, especially if you have a second hard drive, you should store files of the operating system, programs, games - for which quick access is important and which are constantly used.

Regular document files (by documents, I mean video and music and any other media) will play at the same speed from both HDD and SSD, and therefore there is no particular point in storing them on a solid-state drive, provided that this is not the only disk on a computer or laptop.

Hopefully this information will help you extend the lifespan of your SSD and enjoy the speed of its performance. Anything to add? - I will be glad to your comment.

An SSD, or solid-state drive, is very different from classic hard drives in terms of its internal structure and operation, so some operations that can be done on an HDD on an SSD can lead to poor performance and wasted storage resources. We will talk about such operations in this article.

Do not use SATA 2 or SATA 1 interface to connect SSD

This feature applies mainly to old computers and laptops. The fact is that modern solid state drives have read and write speeds of 500-600 MB / s, which is close to the SATA 3 limit of 6 Gb / s (750 MB / s), but still less than it - therefore SSDs connected on such an interface, they will be able to work at maximum speeds. In the case of SATA 2 and 1, their throughput only 3 and 1.5 GB / s (respectively 375 and 187.5 MB / s), so the SSDs connected to them will not be able to work at full speeds, although there will still be a speed increase in comparison with conventional hard drives (since SSDs have much lower latency, and the speed of user HDDs is only 100 MB / s). In the case of the old motherboards you will not do anything - you will have to connect the SSD to the old SATA revisions. But in the case of laptops, you can do it more tricky: often to add an SSD to the system, they use Optibay - a box into which the drive is placed and installed in place of the drive:


In this case, the drive usually works via the SATA 2 interface, when the hard disk in the laptop is connected via SATA 3. Therefore, it makes sense to put the SSD on HDD space so that it can work at maximum speed, and put the hard drive in Optibay, because the speed of SATA 2 is more than enough for it.

Do not defragment your SSD

When writing a file to the drive, the system tries to write it to successive clusters. However, if this fails, the system searches for free clusters and writes parts of the file to them. As a result, it turns out that one file can be written in several places on the disk at once, and therefore, in the case of a hard disk, to read such a file, you have to move and position the read head several times, which takes a lot of time. The defragmentation process allows, as much as possible, to collect scattered parts of a file together to reduce the time it takes to read.

In the case of an SSD, you do not need to perform any mechanical actions to read a part of a file in another cluster, therefore, the access time to any cell, be it at least the next, at least in another place in the drive, is exactly the same - which means defragmentation loses its meaning. Moreover, during defragmentation, files are overwritten so that they are eventually written in one piece, and since the SSD has a limited number of rewrite cycles, it turns out that they are wasted.

Do not use SSD in Windows XP, Vista and other systems that do not support TRIM

TRIM is an ATA interface command that allows the operating system to notify the SSD which data blocks are no longer contained in file system and can be used by the drive for physical removal. If the system does not support TRIM, then you essentially simply cannot delete the file from the SSD. Therefore, when you need to write something to the SSD, you will not have to write the data, but overwrite it, which will greatly reduce the speed of the drive. In addition, the impossibility of deleting data makes it possible to read it, which can be unsafe if the data is confidential.

Don't completely fill your SSD

Any SSD always has filled blocks, partially filled blocks, and empty blocks. In an empty block, the write speed is maximum - no additional operations are required. But if a block is partially filled, then in order to write to it, you first have to transfer the information originally written to it into the cache, change it, adding a new one, and only then write from the cache back to the block - all this takes time and, as a result, greatly reduces the speed of work. with a drive. Accordingly, while there are free blocks on the SSD, the system writes information to them and the write speed is high. When they end, recording starts in partially filled blocks and the speed drops dramatically. Practice shows that SSD loses little in speed if it is not more than 80% busy - that is, it is worth leaving about 50 GB free on a 240 GB drive.

Do not use SSD as storage for large amounts of data

Of course, you can store all the files on an SSD as on an HDD. But there are data types, the speed of work with which depends little on the type of drive: for example, it makes no sense to store your collection of music or movies on an SSD, because they will be played on the hard drive just as quickly, but without wasting cycles of rewriting the solid-state drive ... For the same reason, you should not download files from the Internet to an SSD (except, perhaps, program installers) - the Internet speed is still much lower than the write speed to the HDD, so the download time will be the same, but the SSD's lifetime can be extended.