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The new generation storage: SSD

This time we'll be learning about something which has already been in the market for a long time but still many of us doesn't understand its importance or how it is significantly better than its counterparts. That new thing is Solid State Drive (SSD). SSD is just another storage media like your pendrive and harddisk but it is way faster than either of them. In this post, we will learn what really makes an SSD faster than other storage media and how it can change our life forever.

What really is an SSD ?

SSD is a flash device just like pendrives, micro sd cards and embedded storage of our mobile phones. A flash device is basically made of transistors and semiconductors as compared to harddisk which has magnetic disk and moving parts. I may introduce some heavy terms here which may not make sense to you much but keep reading. So like i was saying, flash devices have billions of transistors which are used to store data. Multiple transistors are joined to form a kind of a cell. A cell either can be NAND cell or NOR cell based on the configuration. One cell can hold one of 2 states (there are cells which can hold one of many states but lets stick to basic cell) either one or zero. As we all know (alright, some of us know), that everything is binary when it comes to computers, a combination of cell can store any value. All you have to do is to turn some cells ON and turn some cells OFF to store your particular value. This is achieved by passing a current to those cells and thus changing their states.

What makes SSD better ?

As you know now that storing a value in a cell is just a matter of passing the current, one may wonder how much time does it take. Well, the answer is 0 seconds, 0 milliseconds, 0 microseconds. Yes, that happens in nanoseconds. That said, now lets talk about harddisk. Harddisk is a giant blunder of magnetic disks and moving arms. It served the purpose of storing data to a good time until people realized that computers can perform better if all the data required by applications is already in RAM because fetching it from harddisk is a slow process and not even the fastest processor can do any good with it. So the bottom line is, storage media is the bottleneck for high performance. The way harddisks operate is itself so optimized that there is no way to get something better out of it. If you ever open a harddisk (or see the diagram below), you will notice that it has one pin which needs to go to the location where the requested data is stored. This involves movement of the pin and is a microseconds job.

On the other hand, SSD just requires current to be passed to some specific cells which is a nanoseconds job. SSD itself has its own RAM and a simple processor which keep things moving. Thus SSD can serve better and can provide data at a much faster rate than traditional harddisk drives.

Role of SSD in laptops

Like i said earlier, SSDs' write and read speed is pretty much higher than harddisks and applications which run on our laptop constantly require memory to write and read stuff. Even when you start an application, it boots up when processor reads the binary from the storage. So SSD can not even make your applications run smoothly but it can also improve applications startup time. I myself has experienced this on my intel-i3 laptop where my OS (ubuntu 18.04) is installed on one of samsung SSD. The boot up time has improved to 2-3 seconds and even android studio runs like a charm without GPU (But that has something to do with 8GB RAM also). So if you go to buy a laptop for your college work then i would suggest you to go for a laptop which has all basic parts like good enough processor(i5), may be GPU card, decent screen, which can come at a decent price of 40k. Just make sure it has additional RAM slot. Then spend additional 12k to buy more RAM and one 256GB internal SSD. Go to some laptop repair shop and ask him to replace your HDD with your brand new SSD and your CD player with the HDD he just removed. That way you can install your applications and OS (like windows 10) on your SSD and keep your other stuff like movies on HDD. Also ask the repairman to install that extra RAM to the additional RAM slow in your laptop. Just make sure you buy the RAM of the same frequency as the already installed one. At the end, you will have a powerful laptop in under 55k. Companies offer laptops with same configuration at a 15-20k higher price which is not at all required.

This was it for today's post fellas. If you need any help selecting the laptop or which SSD to buy, just drop a comment and i will reply faster than SSD serves data :D.

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