Laptop Solid State Drives

Solid state is an electrical term that refers to electronic circuitry that is built entirely out of semiconductors. The term was originally used to define those electronics such as a transistor radio that used semiconductors rather than vacuum tubes in its construction. Most all electronics that we have today are built around semiconductors and chips. In terms of a SSD, it refers to the fact that the primary storage medium is through semiconductors rather than a magnetic media such as a hard drive.

How Do They Work?

Traditional HDD have a spinning platter with a head that reads data from the platter. Remember all those hard drive crashes? This was primarily due to the vulnerability of the head being jarred by dropping or bumping into the computer and crashing into the platter causing mechanical and or read/write errors. Solid State Drives have no moving parts. Instead they have Nand flash chips and a controller.

Increased Performance?

SSDs are noted for faster startups and shutdowns. They also have improved performance when applications are launched. Traditional hard drives get fragmented and slower over time unlike Solid State Drives. Because of this non fragmentation SSDs have a real time improvement with random reads. Performance remains constant throughout the entire drive even when it starts to fill up.

SSD vs Battery Life?

Many components in a notebook computer effect battery life. LCD Screens in particular do. The savings are about 10% prolonged laptop battery life for An SSD vs a traditional hard drive. For most, an SSD upgrade is not worth it for this feature alone.

Which laptop brands have SSD options?

Asus, Lenovo, Samsung, Apple, Dell, Sony, and HP/Compaq are amongst the brands offering SSDs now. Solid State Drives are available in 64, 128, and 256 GB models.