Why getting an SSD is one of the best upgrades you can make

If you haven’t upgraded to an SSD yet, you really should consider it. The advantages compared to traditional mechanical storage are both numerous and large in magnitude. Here’s what you’re missing if you’re still hanging on to HDDs.

First up is the price. Technically, solid-state drives have been around since the 70s, but only became truly accessible for consumers within the last 15 years. With prices now almost comparable to HDDs, even those with limited budgets can afford to add them to the parts list for a new PC build.

When we say performance here, we’re talking about two metrics: Read speeds, and write speeds.

Read speed refers to how fast your computer can get the data from the drive for use in games and other more boring applications. Write speed, by comparison, describes how fast you can save data to the drive.

Both of these operations happen very often and are both heavily responsible in contributing to how quick your computer actually feels. With the latest Gen5 NVMe m.2 SSDs (Like our MP700 PRO) being up to 65 times faster than an HDD you can see that the difference is huge. Happily, it’s a genuinely noticeable difference, too. Upgrading from last year’s GPU to this year’s might give you the knowledge that you’ve got a better PC, but going from an HDD to an SSD is quite literally night and day.

Speaking of night and day, everyone from enthusiastic gamers to hopeless workaholics use their computers day and night, so the storage must be reliable. Here again, we see advantages over mechanical storage.

Basically, mechanical hard drives (HDD), use a spinning magnetic disk called a platter, and a moveable arm called a read-write head. Both of these are powered by individual motors, and these motors must move their respective parts whenever the user is saving data or accessing it. Any engineer will tell you that more moving parts will inevitably lower the reliability of the design.

Again, this leads us to another advantage of the SSD. There are no moving parts in an SSD, hence the “solid state” part of the name. Of course, this doesn’t mean that SSDs will last forever or are 100% reliable, they will still wear out, but this takes orders of magnitude longer than mechanical storage.

There is only one real advantage of mechanical hard drives and it relates to scalability. Large data centres will continue to use hard drives as the maximum capacity of a single hard drive remains larger than the maximum capacity of an SSD. Additionally, with hard drives still slightly cheaper than solid state storage, there are huge monetary advantages when it comes to that aforementioned scalability.

However, the normal PC user does not need yottabytes of storage. Just a couple of terabytes will do, which is why SSDs are the correct choice for consumers these days.

Luckily for you, CORSAIR makes a huge variety of M.2 SSDs, covering all the common size variants, so check them out over at our webstore and enjoy the benefits of a solid-state upgrade ASAP.