How to Use a Small Solid State Drive
One of the main advantages of going with an SSD over a traditional rotating hard drive is that you don't need room for rotating platters. This means you have a lot more choices available for small form factor storage options.
How Big are SSDs?
There are two ways to measure the size of SSDs; physical dimensions and storage capacity. Physical size is particularly important when looking to upgrade laptops as they just have less room inside than a desktop computer.
- Drive: The drive format is an internal solid state drop-in replacement for a standard SATA hard drive. The NAND chips mount as normal and then are placed in a case that resembles a conventional internal HDD.
- Card: Many 1.8-inch SSDs come in a card format, which provides a number of advantages. Not only are they physically smaller without the outer case, but the design makes it easy to mount them almost anywhere on the motherboard rather than in dedicated drive bays.
Why Should You Use an SSD?
There are a number of reasons for choosing SSDs over conventional hard disks. While the latter types are essentially limited to the SATA interface, SSDs can take advantage of other interfaces such as PCIe, NVME, and mSATA.
- Speed: Solid state flash storage is much faster than rotating disks. An SSD can easily saturate a SATA interface so that you can get as much bandwidth as your system can handle. Larger drives are often faster as a Samsung 512 GB SSD can take advantage of more parallel channels than a 128 GB model.
- Power Consumption: It takes a fair bit of battery power to keep those platters spinning, which can be an issue when you're on the go. Going with a solid state drive is a great way to keep your notebook running longer when you can't reach a power plug.
- Reliability: SSDs have no moving parts so there's no chance of a head crash and no motors to wear out.
Choosing an SSD
The first thing to consider when looking for any storage option is whether it will work in your computer. There's no point getting a 4 TB SATA drive and then discovering there's no way you can get that 3.5-inch hard drive inside your laptop. Luckily when it comes to solid state there are a number of options. A 1.8-inch Samsung EVO can fit anywhere inside your machine so long as the interface matches, and many even come with adapters so you can install the unit in your existing bay, rather than letting it move around.
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