You can buy a computer with the fastest processor, the most muscular graphics card, and the speediest RAM. But your computer’s performance will still be throttled if you continue to use a conventional hard drive. That’s why solid state disks (SSDs) are this year’s most coveted upgrade. Venture into the world of SSDs, though, and you’ll see a myriad of competitors — and have a lot of questions. What should you look for in an SSD? Read on to find out.
Q: The rpm ratings of magnetic hard drives are what I use to determine how fast they are. If I buy an SSDs, what should I pay attention to when it comes to speed?
A: First of all, even the slowest of contemporary SSDs will typically read and write data faster than mainstream hard disks, which rely upon rapidly spinning platters with magnetic surfaces. As you probably know, the speed at which those platters spin determines, in large part, how quickly data can be read from them and written to them. That rating is expressed in revolutions per minute (rpm), and today desktop drives that spin at 5400 or 7200 rpm are the norm, with some 10,000 rpm drives preferred by power users.
SSDs are made up of memory chips. There’s nothing that spins, so rpm ratings are history. Instead, as with conventional system memory, the rates at which data can be written to and read from an SSD’s memory chips are expressed in megabytes per second, usually abbreviated as MB/s. Look at the fine print on an SSD’s packaging or online, and you should see two MB/s ratings: one for reading data from the disk and one for writing data to the disk.
Ordinarily SSDs can read data from their internal flash memory faster than they can write data to it. Today,…