When it comes to building a PC, buying a storage drive is a really important task. But, what factors should you consider when buying a storage drive? Should you buy an SSD or an HDD? In this article I will tell you everything you need to know before choosing your drive.
Quick Shopping Tips
Size: Most people would be ok with 256GB. 512GB is ideal especially if you are planning to download a few games and 1 TB is essential for people who want to download a lot of games or generally need more storage.
Compatibility: Get an SSD that is compatible with your PC. This means that you must make sure that your SSD is supported by your motherboard, we will talk about this later. (See: differences between SSDs below)
SSD Vs HDD
So we have two types of storage, SSD and HDD, which one should you go for? SSDs are your best option, they almost beat HDD in every aspect whether it’s speed or lifespan. Only consider an HDD if:
- You need lots of storage: If you need 1TB or more you will need to take your budget and needs into consideration before making a decision.
- Can’t afford an SSD: Since SSDs are more expensive than HDDs you might be better off with an HDD drive if you can’t afford 256GB or 512GB SSDs
It’s worth mentioning that if you want to archive data both SSDs and HDDs aren’t great options. In that case you should opt for a CD, DVD or a Blu-ray Disc.
Differences Between SSDs
In order to buy an SSD you need to know what kind of SSDs does your motherboard support. The things you need to keep in mind are:
SSD Protocols
When people speak about SSDs they mostly split them into two main categories NVMe and SATA. To sum up the differences between them, NVMe is the newer, faster protocol and it uses a PCIe bus as an interface. But, it’s more expensive than SATA. SATA on the other hand is slower than NVMe and uses a SATA bus as an interface. But, it’s available at a better cost.
Don’t get the wrong idea here though, maybe SATA is slower than NVMe but in most situations the difference isn’t really noticeable. You may notice the difference when you are dealing with large files. So if you are planning to upgrade from an HDD and you are kinda on a short budget SATA will give you a huge boost in performance despite being slower than NVMe.
SSD Ports
The way your SSD is connected to the motherboard. Some NVMe based SSDs can be connected via a PCIe slot (also known as an expansion slot) while others can be connected using an M.2 slot. There are two types of SATA SSDs as well (based on what ports they use), ones that can be connected to the motherboard using a SATA port and ones that can be connected using an M.2 slot.
Note that there is a difference between a PCIe slot (port) and a PCIe bus (interface). A PCIe slot is a port where you can plug a graphics card, an SSD, etc. A PCIe bus is a way of connecting components on the motherboard with the CPU.
SSD Form Factor
The size and shape of your SSD is determined by its form factor, this is important since not all form factors might be supported by your motherboard. The most common ones are 2.5-inch, M.2 and PCIe add-in cards.
Summary
- There are two types of Protocols used by SSDs, NVMe (faster) and SATA.
- NVMe uses PCIe bus while SATA uses SATA bus.
- There are three types of ports on the motherboard where you can place an SSD, PCIe slots (only for NVMe), M.2 slots (some of them are for NVMe and some of them are for SATA) and SATA ports.
- SSDs are produced in a lot of shapes, the most common ones are 2.5-inch, M.2 and PCIe add-in cards.
Check For Compatibility
After knowing all of that about SSDs how can you know what SSDs do your motherboard support?
We have this motherboard as an example, I just went to the manufacturer’s official website and here we have these specs. As we can see this motherboard supports 4 M.2 slots and 4 SATA ports. All M.2 slots are key M, three of them support PCIe mode (this means they are compatible with NVMe) and one of them can be used with PCIe or SATA.
Notice that we don’t have PCIe slots listed here because manufactureres list expansion slots in a category all by theirselves not in the storage category.
An easier way of doing this is heading to PCPartPicker which is one of the easiest ways to check for compatibility.
Extra
Things mentioned below aren’t of much importance to most people. But, I wrote this section because knowing these things will help you when reading reviews.
Type Of Memory
Data in SSDs is stored in cells, the most common types of cells are Single-Level Cell (SLC), Multi-Level Cell (MLC), Triple-Level Cell (TLC) and Quad-Level Cell (QLC). These names represent the number of bits stored in each cell, so SLC SSDs can store one bit per cell, MLC can store two bits per cell and so on.
If we would summarise the differences between these types we would say: speed, durability and price. SLC is the best when it comes to speed and durability but that is in exchange for price. As a result SLC based SSDs are used for industrial and commercial applications where high speed, the ability to not wear out quickly are highly important.
So the rule is SSDs that store less bits per cell (like SLC) offer better performance and have higher prices. On the other hand SSDs that store more bits per cell aren’t as good in terms of performance but they are much more affordable.
3D NAND SSDs
3D NAND in simple terms is stacking memory chips (also known as NAND chips) on top of each other which helps to lower the cost of making SSDs.
SSDs Lifespan
SSDs have a lifespan. After using them for long enough they will start to wear out and lose some data too. Fortunately, the lifespan of SSDs these days is long enough that most people don’t need to worry about it.
But, let’s say that you are planning to use your drive to archive data or you will be using it heavily for some other productive workload, you have to do a bit of digging to find out what storage drive suits you. You will need to check for TBW (terabytes written) or DWPD (drive writes per day).
TBW indicates the total amount of data that you can write into your SSD over its life while DWPD tells you the number of times you can fully overwrite per day over a given period of time, usually 5 years.
For example, if you buy a 512GB SSD that is rated at 100 TBW you can overwrite your whole drive 200 times since (200*512GB = 100TB).
On the specs page, you may not find TBW and instead find DWPD which serves the same purpose, telling you how much this drive will last. Say you are looking at a 250GB SSD that is rated at 1 DWPD and it has a 5 year warranty. This means that you can overwrite your whole SSD (250GB) 1 time each day for 5 years before it starts to get damaged.
