SSD disk for computer. Which is better? Choosing an SSD drive for a laptop. Form factor M.2

More and more users are purchasing SSD drives for installation in PCs. They are used in parallel with HDD or instead of them. Solid state drives have many advantages over hard drives. Therefore, you need to know how to choose the right SSD drive for your computer.

What does it represent?

A solid state drive is a non-mechanical storage device. It is intended for installation on PCs, laptops, server equipment and is designed to replace HDDs. An SSD is created based on memory chips that are controlled by a special controller.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:

high data read/write speed and performance;
low heat generation and electricity consumption;
no noise due to the absence of moving parts;
small dimensions;
high resistance to mechanical damage (overload up to 1500g), magnetic fields, temperature changes;
stability of data reading time regardless of memory fragmentation.

Flaws:

limited number of rewrite cycles (1,000 – 100,000 times);
high price;
vulnerability to electrical damage;
the risk of complete loss of information without the possibility of its recovery.

Main characteristics

If you are buying an SSD to install on your computer, pay attention to its main characteristics.

When purchasing an SSD drive, first of all, pay attention to the volume and purpose of use. If you are purchasing it just to install the OS, choose a device with 60 GB or more memory.

Modern gamers prefer to install games on SSDs to increase performance. If you are one of them, then you need an option with a memory capacity of 120 GB.

If you are purchasing a solid state drive instead of a hard drive, base it on how much information is stored on the computer. But in this case, the capacity of the SSD disk should not be less than 250 GB.

Important! The cost of a solid-state drive directly depends on the volume. Therefore, if your budget is limited, use an SSD to install the operating system and a HDD to store data.

Most modern SSD drive models are sold in a 2.5-inch form factor and are built into a protective box. Because of this, they are similar to classic hard drives of the same size.

Good to know! To install a 2.5-inch SSD drive into a standard 3.5-inch mount inside a PC case, special adapters are used. Some case models provide sockets for a 2.5-inch form factor.

There are 1.8-inch and smaller SSDs on the market that are used in compact devices.

Connection interface

Solid state drives have several connection interface options:

SATA II;
SATA III;
PCIe;
mSATA;
PCIe + M.2.

The most common option is to connect using a SATA connector. There are still SATA II models on the market. They are no longer relevant, but even if you purchase such a device, thanks to the backward compatibility of the SATA interface, it will work with a motherboard that supports SATA III.

When using an SSD with a PCIe interface, you may need to install drivers, but the data transfer speed will be higher compared to a SATA connection.

mSATA models are used on compact devices, but work on the same principle as the standard SATA interface.

M.2 or NGFF (Next Generation Form Factor) models are a continuation of the development of the mSATA line. They have smaller dimensions and greater flexibility for configuration by digital equipment manufacturers.

Read/write speed

The higher this value, the more productive the computer. Average speeds:

reading 450-550 MB/s;
recording 350-550 Mb/s.

Manufacturers may indicate the maximum read/write speed rather than the actual one. To find out the real numbers, look online for reviews of the model you are interested in.

In addition, pay attention to the access time. This is the time during which the disk finds the information required by the program or OS. The standard indicator is 10-19 ms. But because SSDs have no moving parts, they are significantly faster than HDDs.

Memory type and runtime to failure

There are several types of memory cells used in SSD drives:

MLC (Multi Level Cell);
SLC (Single Level Cell);
TLC (Three Level Cell);
3D V-NAND.

MLC is the most common type, which allows you to store two bits of information in one cell. It has a relatively short resource of rewrite cycles (3,000 - 5,000), but lower cost, due to which this type of cells is used for mass production of solid-state drives.

The SLC type stores only one bit of data per cell. These microcircuits are characterized by a long lifetime (up to 100,000 rewrite cycles), high data transfer rates, and minimal access time. But due to the high cost and small data storage volumes, they are used for server and industrial solutions.

The TLC type stores three bits of data. The main advantage is low production cost. Among the disadvantages: the number of rewrite cycles is 1,000 - 5,000 repetitions, and the read/write speed is significantly lower than the first two types of chips.

Healthy! Recently, manufacturers have managed to increase the lifetime of TLC discs to 3,000 rewrite cycles.

3D V-NAND models use 32-layer flash memory instead of standard MLC or TLC chips. The microchip has a three-dimensional structure, due to which the volume of recorded data per unit area is much higher. At the same time, the reliability of information storage increases by 2-10 times.

The reliability of the solid-state drive depends on the manufacturer. Famous companies produce high-quality devices with subsequent technical and hardware support. Their factories have high requirements, which ensures excellent quality of products.

Modern manufacturers of SSD drives: Samsung, OCZ (a division of Toshiba), Kingston, Crucial, Corsair, Plextor, GOODRAM, Silicon Power, Transcend.

TRIM function

The most important additional feature for an SSD is TRIM (garbage collection). It is as follows.

Information on the SSD is first written to free cells. If the disk writes data to a cell that was previously used, it first clears it (unlike an HDD, where data is written over existing information). If the model does not support TRIM, it clears the cell just before writing new information, causing the operation to slow down.

If the SSD supports TRIM, it receives a command from the OS to delete data in the cell and clears it not before overwriting, but during the “idle” of the disk. This is done in the background. This maintains the write speed at the level specified by the manufacturer.

Important! The TRIM function must be supported by the operating system.

Hidden area

This area is not accessible to the user and is used to replace failed cells. In high-quality solid-state drives it is up to 30% of the device volume. But some manufacturers, in order to reduce the cost of an SSD drive, reduce it to 10%, thereby increasing the amount of storage available to the user.

The flip side of this trick is that the hidden region is used by the TRIM function. If its volume is small, it will not be enough for background data transfer, which is why when the SSD “load” level is 80-90%, the writing speed will drop sharply.

Model overview

Below is a list of several popular models.

		Form Factor		Read/write speed		Those. process	Weight

Installing the best SSD on your computer is a quick and easy way to improve your PC's performance over a traditional hard drive. Here are our picks for the best SSDs for gaming, so you can skip the sales consultant noodles and maximize your PC's performance.

SSDs aren't just the preserve of the PC gaming elite anymore—even the best SSDs are now more affordable than ever. In addition, new technologies are being developed that make them faster, as well as provide more powerful and affordable SSD capabilities.

Glossary of SSD terms
There are so many different SSD technologies, interfaces, and protocols that make it difficult for the average consumer to choose. So now we've selected the top drives to help you find the best SSD for you.

The best SSD drives for comfortable gaming:

Samsung 960 EVO 500GB

Controller: Samsung Polaris | Memory: Samsung 3-bit MLC | Socket: M.2 (NVMe)

Approx. $234 / £212

When it comes to achieving a combination of speed, capacity and cost, it's nearly impossible to beat Samsung's mainstream PCIe SSD. The 960 EVO is an outstanding piece of storage silicon and represents the pinnacle of all SSD drives available today. The 1TB version can still be quite expensive at $480 (£401).

The main choice for SSD is 500 GB disk space. That's enough to install Windows and most of the regular games in your Steam library, and at a much more reasonable price. The Samsung 960 EVO 500GB is available for around $240 (£212).

TurboWrite technology means its TLC V-NAND can often perform at the same levels as the more expensive SLC memory type, thanks to some dynamic caching algorithms. And this means that it can easily outperform most professional drives in real time and in synthetic tests.

However, it's worth noting here that this is an M.2 SSD, which means you'll either need to have an M.2 socket on your motherboard or use an expansion card adapter and stick it in a spare PCIe slot. Sometimes there can be problems loading the OS from adapters, especially on older motherboards, so this is something to keep in mind. But if your hardware is more or less new, you shouldn’t pay attention to this.

Samsung is at the top of the SSD world, and that makes the 960 EVO the best SSD to start playing games and get the most out of them right away.

Controller: Silicon Motion SM2260 | Memory: Intel 3D TLC | Socket: M.2 PCIe

Approx. $219 / £161

The Intel SSD 600p is a pretty interesting SSD. Intel typically targets highly specialized, high-value, high-performance parts, although the SSD 600p is aiming for a more mainstream market. It packs a lower-cost controller and TLC memory to make it one of the most affordable PCIe drives today. It may not be the fastest, but it is quite a promising SSD. A great little entry-level NVMe SSD.

Samsung 850 EVO 500GB

Approx. $160 / £138

I recommend a two year old SSD, it's pretty good these days and shows excellent results. When it comes to SATA connections, the limits have long been reached. The interface has a theoretical maximum of 600 MB/s, and modern 2.5-inch SSDs. So, although it's old fashioned now, the 850 EVO is still around the best, and at a reasonable price too.

Approx. $195 / £161

Previous versions of Kingston's HyperX SATA drivers used a slow SandForce controller, but more recent Savage drives have a more powerful Phison memory controller that allows for significantly improved performance on uncompressible (video and graphics files) data, as well as 4k random read/write speeds. These itty bitty -files are a good indicator of the overall performance of the OS under standard use. The HyperX Savage is a very capable SSD at a great price.

Controller: Samsung Polaris | Memory: Samsung 2-bit MLC | Socket: M.2 (NVMe)

Approx. $587 / £489

If the Samsung 960 EVO can pass almost the same synthetic tests as the 960 Pro, why would you spend the extra money? For most users, there's no need for a pro-tier SSD, but if you want the fastest SSD available, then the 960 Pro would be one of them. Sure, the EVO is fast in synthetic testing, but it uses some tricks to get there, while the Pro's more powerful MLC memory is too much in its raw state without any additional software magic to tear up all tests.

The 960 Pro comes with a full five-year warranty and has twice the runtime of the EVO. If you have a serious workhorse that's constantly inundated with large amounts of data, you need to choose the reliability of the 960 Pro.

The Pro is also clearly faster in our real-world file transfer testing, transferring our 30GB folder of mixed files about 15 seconds faster than its little brother.

For most PC gamers, Samsung's SSD has really gone the extra mile. If you still think you need PRO or EVO, look at the tests below.

Controller: Intel NVMe | Memory: Intel MLC | Slot: PCIe (NVMe)

Approx. $425 / £365

When Intel first abandoned the SSD 750 drive, it lost its lead. While it's still competitive, the write performance is half that of Samsung's latest 960-inch drives, which knocked it into second place. However, its 4x random speed is still the best in the business, making it a very responsive SSD, and the 400GB version is really bordering on affordable right now.

Controller: Marvell 9187 | Memory: SanDisk MLC | Jack: SATA (AHCI)

Approx. $240 / £200

It may seem a little misleading to recommend this product as "high-end," but despite its relative age, the SanDisk Extreme Pro is one of the most powerful SSD devices you'll find. It has decent levels of overall storage performance, slightly lower than the Samsung 850 Pro. Even when you seriously clog the drive with a lot of data, it will still continue to operate at the same speed, making it the best SATA drive for heavy workloads. Have you ever noticed how slow your system is when loading games from Steam onto your boot drive? Not if you are using Extreme Pro. And this is a good price for such a reliable SSD.

Samsung 850 EVO 250GB

Controller: Samsung MEX | Memory: Samsung 3-bit MLC | Jack: SATA (AHCI)

Approx. $95 / £85

Because their SSD components are made in-house—from memory to cache to controller software—Samsung can be incredibly aggressive on price. This in turn means that their lower bandwidth drives are some of the cheapest, as well as the fastest, SSDs out there. Samsung is truly in all sectors, making their 850 EVO easily the best budget SSD.

The EVO 250GB doesn't quite match the speeds of its high-power siblings, sitting below the 500MB/s read and below 400MB/s write mark, but it's still strong when it comes to 4 random reads/ drive recording. This means it still responds well as an SSD when it comes to general use, even if it's a little slower at handling large files.

HyperX Savage 240GB

Controller: Phison S10 | Memory: Toshiba MLC | Jack: SATA (AHCI)

Approx. $120 / £99

The HyperX Savage is an excellent drive in this market, with a $100+ price tag delivering impressive performance in both sequential and 4x random testing. Due to the over-provisioning of the Phison controller, you lose a bit more storage space due to the base 256GB NAND memory inside, but what's 10GB.

Everything you need to know about testing

We measure SSD performance in several ways. Manufacturers will always quote peak sequential read/write speeds for their drives, but often some of the drives barely match the average performance we get in benchmarking. In our testing, we measure both maximum read/write speeds using compressed data using ATTO benchmarks, and average performance with incompressible data from the AS SSD.

SSD memory controllers often use memory compression algorithms to improve file processing times, but if they encounter file types that they cannot compress (if they are already compressed, such as video and audio files), performance can slow down greatly. This was the biggest problem with the previously ubiquitous SandForce controller. However, modern controllers have less of a problem with incompressible data.

We also test the random 4k read/write performance of this drive. The tiny 4kb files represent constant reads and writes from your disk drives that run for as long as your system is running, a general maintenance that the operating system loves to receive. The faster the drive can handle these tiny files, the more responsive they will feel during everyday use.

How to choose an SSD

The best SSDs have revolutionized the hard drive market, delivering faster data transfer speeds every year, requiring technological innovation from chip designers, motherboard manufacturers and interface designers.

The first thing you need to talk about when you want to buy an SSD is capacity. All SSDs will be faster than the spinning mechanical drives of a standard hard drive, but ol hard drives still have the advantage of coming in huge sizes for small amounts. And games, applications and other resources are only growing, requiring large volumes of disks.

For this reason, I would say that for any SSD under 240GB it is a waste of money. With games like Doom and Hitman taking up 72GB and 61GB respectively. You'll only be able to get your operating system and maybe four games onto your fast boot drive. Ideally, you want as much free space as possible.

To choose a high-speed storage device, you need to know how they and their memory controllers work. SSDs are basically made up of NAND flash memory chips (where the storage happens), a DRAM memory chip, and a memory controller (the brain).

Most memory controllers really excel at multi-threading, so the more NAND chips connected to a multi-channel memory controller, the faster the drive can capture data. With high-capacity drives, where there are more NAND chips, it will be faster.

SATA or PCIe?

One of the most popular questions is what to choose - should you go with a standard SATA-based drive or choose one of the new fangled PCIe-based M.2 NVMe options?

The SATA interface is the basic connection on which your hard drives have been connected for years, and it has barely evolved. The SATA interface has been upgraded to provide a theoretical limit of 600 MB/s. At the time, this seemed fast, doubling the previous speed, but SSD performance grew rapidly to reach this limit, thereby displacing the SATA interface.

Thus, the upper echelons of the SSD market have moved to the higher bandwidth offered by the PCIe interface. Unfortunately, they were still tied to the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) protocol, a set of commands for each storage device.

A PCIe SSD uses the AHCI protocol and still must be launched through a variety of legacy commands designed to spin up hard drives. This wastes a whole bunch of processing cycles, and means it has to respond until commands are processed and largely ignored before it can actually do anything. This is why a new protocol was desperately needed to advance solid state drives. This resulted in a non-volatile transfer protocol (NVMe) built from the ground up specifically to take advantage of solid-state environments. NVMe has about a third the number of instructions in the stack, freeing up compatible SSDs to use the full bandwidth offered by the PCIe interface.

A solid state drive is not much different in appearance from an HDD.

The abbreviation SSD stands for Solid State Drive. You can translate it into Russian as a solid-state drive. Its main advantage is the absence of moving internal parts, that is, all operations are performed by electronic units.

In fact, the first solid state drive appeared in 1978. But in those days, the benefits of its use were very doubtful, and production was costly. SSDs were introduced to the general public around 2007-2008. They were modest in memory size and could have around 128 GB. Nowadays, there are already models of solid-state drives with a capacity of 1 TB and read/write speeds of 2600/1600 MB/s. And not so long ago, the Russian company GS Group began producing SSDs.

In a special publication on our portal, we will talk in detail about what RAM is in a computer. You will learn the characteristics of RAM, how to find out the amount of RAM and types of RAM on your computer.

The difference between SSD and HDD

The most important difference is in the design. An SSD has no moving parts, which means there is nothing inside it to wear out. And as a result - the absence of noise. Due to the fact that all the elements inside the SSD are soldered and secured, such a drive is much more resistant to shocks and vibrations.

On a HDD, files are read by passing the magnetic head over the surface of the disk. The reading and writing speed in this case depends on the disk rotation speed. In an SSD, there is no magnetic disk as such, and reading occurs by checking the memory cells for the presence of charge in them, which is undoubtedly faster.

The same applies to random access to data. For example, to simultaneously read several different HDD files, its magnetic head will have to “rush” between different sections of the disk to ensure timely loading of data. An SSD can simultaneously find and load several files at once.

Well, another significant advantage is low energy consumption.

Well, now it’s worth remembering the shortcomings. The most important of them, because of which many users were initially afraid to switch to SSDs, is the limited number of rewrite cycles. In other words, the more often data on a disk is overwritten, the sooner it will fail. Moreover, this happened at the most unexpected moments for the user. But the technology is improving, mechanisms are being added to control the number of cell rewrites, which allow new data to be added to less “worn-out” ones. Memory types are also being upgraded, which will further extend the life of the device.

Another repulsive factor is the price of the SSD drive. But this is a temporary phenomenon, as the cost is gradually decreasing. For example, today an average quality 500 GB disk can be bought for about 9,000 rubles. An HDD of this volume can be purchased for 2,000–3,000 rubles, with a disk rotation speed of 7200 rpm.

Well, the last thing worth knowing about SSDs is the impossibility of recovering files after deletion. Although some manufacturers provide their devices with mechanisms that allow this to be done. Perhaps in the future we will see an SSD with all the capabilities of an HDD, but without its disadvantages.

Main technical characteristics of SSD drives for PCs

The main parameters by which it is customary to choose an SSD are: volume, form factor, connection type and read/write speeds. But, besides them, there are other, less popular options. Let's look into all the intricacies of the characteristics and find out which SSD to choose when purchasing.

Volume

It makes no sense to explain specifically about the capacity of a hard drive in our digital age. In short, it characterizes the maximum amount of data that can be written to it. It is measured in gigabytes and, more recently, in terabytes. 1TB = 1000 GB.

Disk board

This is interesting: in fact, there is a little confusion with terabytes, as with other units - gigabytes and megabytes. The fact is that almost all applications and OS use 1024 GB as a terabyte. But in the SI unit measurement system, the prefix “tera” means 1012, that is, exactly 1,000,000,000,000. Almost all hard drive manufacturers adhere to the “correct” metric: 1 TB = 1000 GB. But the operating system can calculate and display the volume in its own way, based on 1TB = 1024 GB.

In general, the main selection criterion is the more, the better.

Form factor

There are 4 main form factors present on the market: 1.8“, 2.5“, 3.5“ and several varieties of M.2. The first two standards are usually used as a laptop SSD hard drive. The rest are more common on desktop versions of PCs. If everything is clear with inches, then M.2 is worth understanding in more detail.

Form factor 2.5"

M.2 is a relatively new specification for connectors and boards. Mainly used to connect SSDs, but other devices are also present, such as USB, Wi-Fi modules, etc. In most cases, there are SSDs with M and B keys. This is easy to determine - there will be three separate buses on the board: two small and one large in the middle. Also, boards are divided into 2242, 2260, 2280. This is nothing more than the size. The first two digits indicate the width, the rest - the length.

Form factor M.2 and its varieties

ATTENTION!

Before installing an SSD drive on your computer, you should make sure that the module does not interfere with other components of the motherboard and cooling.