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TechKnowSurge Catalog Videos Solid State Drives (SSDs)
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Solid State Drives (SSDs)

Solid state drives offer significantly faster performance than traditional hard disk drives by using flash memory chips instead of mechanical moving parts, and they come in a range of form factors and interfaces including 2.5-inch SATA, M.2, and PCIe NVMe configurations.

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About this video

Solid state drives store data using flash memory chips rather than spinning magnetic platters and mechanical read/write heads, which is why they deliver significantly faster read and write speeds than traditional hard disk drives. Because there are no moving parts, the drive does not need to physically seek out data across a rotating surface, and that fundamental difference is what accounts for the performance gains that made SSD upgrades so impactful on older systems. Today, most modern computers include some form of solid state storage for their primary drives, while hard disk drives are often retained for bulk or long-term backup storage where high capacity at low cost matters more than speed. SSDs are notable for having more variety in form factors and interfaces than virtually any other storage type. Early SSDs were designed to match the physical dimensions of existing hard disk drives, particularly the 2.5-inch form factor with a SATA interface, to ease the transition. As the technology matured, manufacturers developed smaller and faster options, including mSATA and the M.2 form factor, which can use either the SATA interface or the faster PCIe bus with the NVMe protocol. SSDs are primarily nonvolatile storage devices, meaning data is retained without power, though some enterprise configurations use volatile memory with a battery backup to achieve the same result while gaining additional speed.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Solid State Drives

Aligned to

CompTIA A+ Core 1
3.3 Given a scenario, select and install storage devices.
5.3 Given a scenario, troubleshoot and diagnose problems with storage drives and RAID arrays.
CompTIA Tech+
2.5 Compare and contrast storage types.
CompTIA Server+
1.2 Given a scenario, deploy and manage storage.
4.3 Given a scenario, troubleshoot storage problems.

Key terms

Solid State Drive
SSD
A storage device that uses flash memory chips with no moving mechanical parts to store data persistently, offering faster read/write speeds, lower latency, and greater durability than traditional hard disk drives. SSDs connect via SATA, NVMe, or M.2 interfaces.
Hard Disk Drive
HDD
A traditional storage device that uses rotating magnetic platters and read/write heads to store and retrieve data persistently. HDDs offer high-capacity storage at lower cost per gigabyte than SSDs, but with slower speeds and moving mechanical parts.
Form Factor
The physical size, shape, and connector type of a hardware component such as a drive or motherboard; form factor determines compatibility with a given system chassis or slot.
Serial Advanced Technology Attachment
SATA
A serial interface standard for connecting storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives to a computer's motherboard, replacing the older parallel ATA standard with faster speeds and thinner cables. SATA remains common for HDDs and budget SSDs.
mSATA
A compact solid-state drive form factor based on the SATA interface, designed for space-constrained devices such as laptops and embedded systems; significantly smaller than the standard 2.5-inch drive while delivering the same SATA performance.
M.2
A small card-style internal drive form factor that plugs directly into a motherboard slot, supporting both SATA and NVMe interfaces to deliver high storage performance in a minimal physical footprint; standard in modern laptops and desktops.
Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
PCIe
A high-speed serial expansion bus standard used to connect hardware components such as GPUs, NVMe SSDs, and network cards directly to the motherboard. PCIe uses lanes to transfer data, with more lanes providing greater bandwidth for demanding components.
Non-Volatile Memory Express
NVMe
A high-performance storage interface protocol designed for solid-state drives that connects directly to the CPU via the PCIe bus, delivering significantly lower latency and higher throughput than older SATA-based SSDs. NVMe is the standard interface for modern high-speed storage.
Non-Volatile Storage
Storage that retains data without a continuous power supply, making it suitable for long-term data persistence. Examples include SSDs, HDDs, and ROM.

Topics

Solid State Drives Storage Hardware Sata Nvme M2 Form Factor Hdd Vs Ssd Computer Hardware

Transcript

The first thing to realize is that one of the best upgrades you could make to your computer a while ago was to move to a solid state drive. These hard disk drives were just so slow, and once you did that upgrade to the solid state drives it really improved the performance of the machine. That's because there are no physical moving parts inside a solid state drive, where there are in this hard disk drive, where it has to actually search for the data. So this is a great upgrade, and now most computers nowadays have some element of solid state drives.

For instance, my computer that I'm doing my editing on, that I have right here, that I do a lot of my work on: most of my data is on these solid state drives. And then I have a hard disk drive, a really big hard disk drive, that does all of my backup. Once I'm done editing things, I put it on one of these hard disk drives for long-term backup, because I can buy lots of storage for pretty cheap.

Form factors and interfaces

When it comes to form factors and interfaces, solid state drives have some of the most variety to them, and that's because we had all of these hard disk drives before and they had certain sizes and shapes. So when solid state drives came along and started replacing our hard disk drives, they needed to match the same size and shape. However, as they became more prevalent, what we started doing is making them smaller and making them faster, and so we started creating different form factors when it comes to solid state drives, and different interfaces, and different protocols for communicating. So we have some of the most variety now with the solid state drives.

This is an example of a 2.5 inch form factor that uses SATA as the connection. This is an example of an mSATA form factor that uses SATA as the connection. And this is an example of m.2 that uses PCIe as the connection and NVMe as the communication.

Inside a solid state drive

If you want to take a look inside of what you would see inside of a solid state drive, we can see that there are different chips here, just like we see here on this board and this board, although they're covered up by some stickers there. Essentially, yes, it's all these chips that are storing the data. That's where the data gets stored.

Characteristics

The purpose of solid state drives is really to have nonvolatile storage. However, there are a few edge cases that use volatile storage but with a battery backup to make it nonvolatile. So that's primarily the characteristic that we're looking at, and of course it's using solid state technology. We use this in a lot of different components on the computer, and then we also have many different form factors that we can find out there.

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