Narrator: In this lesson we're going to cover
solid state drives, or solid state devices,
which are more commonly called SSDs.
Now, a solid state drive, or solid state device,
is going to use flash memory technology
to implement persistent mass storage
instead of using rotating and spinning platters
like we saw with traditional hard disk drives.
Because of this, flash memory can give us
a much better performance than those mechanical components
that were used inside of our hard disk drives,
especially in terms of reading performance,
because we can seek to any part of that SSD
almost instantly,
whereas with a hard drive,
we have to spin the platter around
and then move the seek head to be able to find that part
we want to read from.
Because of this lack of mechanical components,
SSDs are much faster
and much more durable than a traditional hard drive.
For example, if I drop a traditional hard drive
I'd actually risk losing all of my data
because that platter might get moved out of place,
or the read/write head could actually scratch the platter,
and that would make me lose my data.
But because SSDs don't have the mechanical
and moving pieces inside of them, if you drop them
you are less likely to damage them
or lose your data that's stored on them.
To be able to destroy an SSD by dropping it,
you really have to drop it from like a five story building
and really give it a lot of force
in order to crack the memory chips
or the circuit board inside of it,
and that could lead to data loss.
SSDs first commonly became used inside of tablets
and smartphones because of their small form factor,
and the ability to have no moving parts
makes them very energy efficient.
This allows you to have longer battery life
for these portable devices.
Over time, these started finding their ways into laptops,
and more recently, you're seeing SSDs included in desktops
and servers as well because of their high performance,
even though they do have a higher cost
than a traditional hard drive.
When it comes to SSDs,
there are three main form factors you're going to come across,
these are called 2.5 inch, 1.8 inch,
and an M2 form factor.
Now, a 2.5 inch form factor is going to be
the typical form factor that's used
when you're replacing a traditional hard drive
inside of a laptop
or one of the smaller form factor desktops.
1.8 inch form factor used to be used widely inside
of smaller laptops, but these days,
that's been replaced by the M2 form factor.
The M2 form factor doesn't resemble
a traditional hard drive at all,
and instead, it looks like a memory chip.
It is very small, it is very sleek and it is very light,
and it makes it a great product to use
when you're using laptops because of the fact
that it has this very small package, or small form factor.
When it comes to connecting your SSD,
there are multiple different ways you can do this
depending on which SSD you're using.
If you're using one of the older SSDs,
these rely on SATA to connectors.
Now, this would plug in
just like a regular SATA hard drive would,
where you would use a seven pin SATA data cable
and plug it into the SSD,
along with the 15 pin SATA power cable
in order to make the connection for that drive.
If you're using a 2.5 inch or 1.8 inch form factor
with your SSD, they are typically going to rely
on a SATA connection.
Now, as an alternative to this,
there was something developed called mSATA.
Now, mSATA is a smaller form factor that allows an SSD
to be packaged as an adapter card that can be plugged
into a combined data and power port on your motherboard.
This actually would operate at the same speed
as a regular SATA connection,
so if you're using a SATA version three connection,
this would be a six gigabit per second connection
which translates roughly
to about 600 megabytes per second of throughput.
Now, this can become a bottleneck for you though
because SSDs are really fast,
and they can operate faster than SATA speeds.
Because of this, manufacturers created something
known as NVMe, which stands for the
Non-Volatile Memory Express.
This will be used with M2 form factor SATA devices,
and allows you to plug directly into the motherboard,
using this NVMe port.
Oftentimes on your motherboard,
this will be labeled as M2, although M2 is technically
the form factor of the SSD and not the connector type,
because the connector type is NVMe.
Now, in addition to SATA, mSATA, and NVMe,
there's another one called PCIe,
which stands for PCI Express,
or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express.
That's right,
those same PCI Express slots on your motherboard,
whether they're x1 or x16,
can also hold an SSD if you buy an SSD that is form-factored
for those slots and can use those.
The reason you'd want to do this
is that those slots are faster than SATA,
but they do tend to be slower than NVMe,
and so most SSDs these days are going to be installed
as an M2 form factor,
using an NVMe connection to the motherboard.
Remember, when it comes to SSDs,
you're going to get great performance
but limited storage capability,
based on the same price tag as a traditional hard drive.
For this reason,
a lot of people will use a mixture of two devices,
both an SSD to host their main operating system
and applications, which require higher speeds,
and then a larger mechanical hard drive
to be able to store all of your large data files,
because it is a lot cheaper to do that
on a traditional hard drive.
Now, because of this performance versus cost issue,
there was something developed known as a hybrid drive.
A hybrid drive was actually a transitional technology
when SSDs were first coming into the marketplace
and I haven't really seen 'em much these days
but I wanted to bring it to your attention
in case you run into it.
Now, a hybrid drive looks just like a traditional hard drive
and it fits into the normal 2.5 inch
or 3.5 inch form factor.
But in addition to the traditional components
of a hard drive with the platter, the actuator,
and the read/write heads,
it also has an SSD embedded inside of that device.
So the way this works is that the drive learns over time
what files are commonly used, such as your application files
or your operating system files,
and it tries to store those on the SSD portion
of this internal drive.
And then, for any of the larger data files
that you're not using as routinely,
it offloads those onto the mechanical hard drive.
Overall, this does have better performance
than a traditional hard drive,
but it does have worse performance than a dedicated SSD.
And for that reason, they're not that popular
in the marketplace anymore
because they're not really going to save you that much money,
and instead, most people will just buy two drives,
one SSD and one traditional hard drive,
and then separate out the files themselves
based on their use case and their needs.