SSD Buying Considerations

SSDs are the storage medium of choice if speed is your top priority, but there are a few points you should bear in mind when purchasing, because not all SSDs are the same.

SATA

• The Serial ATA or SATA interface is used by all hard drives, and there are two basic types.  SATA II is slower than SATA III, so if you have the cutting edge hardware you’ll go for SATA III because faster will be better, as with a standard hard drive.  A SATA II SSD, despite being way faster than a standard hard drive on SATA III, will still be a lot slower than the optimal SATA III.           

Form Factor

• SSDs have 2.5 inch form factors rather than standard hard drives’ 3.5 inch ones, so you can easily use them in laptops as well as desktops.  However, an SSD can easily be fitted into a 3.5 inch drive bay because it will come with a suitable bracket, so this shouldn’t be an issue.  Just bear in mind that you may need to check the physical thickness of any SSD you are considering fitting into very small laptops or netbooks.

Performance

• SSDs never perform badly and even the cheapest and slowest will be far superior to any hard drive, even an above-average one.  At the same time, not all SSDs are equal in performance levels. Performance can differ enormously, even between two SSDs that use the same type of SATA.  The limiting factor here is the chip that performs the data management and exchange, called the controller.  Some of these are faster than others, when buying an SSD you should take a look at the printed maximum transfer rates on the package.

• Random access rates should also be considered, as these are the ones that come into play for other programs, as well as the general operating system functions.  IOPS is the measurement for this and will apply to both the write and read speeds.

Trim Support

• Trim is a system used by the majority of modern operating systems, this allows the SSD to find those files that can be permanently deleted without the user having to be involved.  Make sure that the SSD you’re thinking of purchasing supports trim, as not all of them do.  The problems arise because SSDs on their own are not capable of physically wiping a file clean, they are only able to use the space for overwriting of existing data once the pointers have been changed.  Due to this, trim helps to avoid performance degradation, so look out for it.

Warranty

• SSDs like everything else have a limited lifespan, even flash memory cannot be written to indefinitely; incidentally, defragmenting an SSD should never be performed because it will cause a lot of additional wear and tear.  Buy an SSD with an extensive warranty lasting several years if you’re worried about heavy usage affecting its performance.