A Solid State Drive or SSD is a storage device that directly substitutes the Hard Drives present on the computer. Hard Drive uses a magnetically charged diodes that store data converted into a magnetic field which can be used whenever the device is powered it is converted into electric pulses and accessed by the computer.
Since the inception of Hard Drives in 1956 by IBM they are constantly getting compact with better read and write speeds and also the Hard Drives can be found very cheap. The Hard Drives are classified with the speed of the drive the most common Hard Drives are 7200RPM Drive from Toshiba since the laptop manufacturers usually opt for them.
On the other hand, SSDs are slowly getting common nowadays, and they have a drastically different way to store data. They are much compact in size and have the read and write speed that cannot be matched by any mechanical drive (Mechanical drive is another name of the Hard Drives).
Hard Drive fallacies
Hard Drives have many fallacies due to their mechanical structure, even though the advanced protection techniques are applied to every Hard Drive nowadays they get damaged even by a mere fall from height. Just like that, there is no guarantee that a certain Hard drive will sustain for that many years, they are prone to crash and burns more than any other hardware found in your computer. The first SSD from the SanDisk corporation shipped in 1991 was made taking all these fallacies into account and made a drive that can easily beat any Hard Drive in reading and write speeds, and at the time of its reveal, SanDisk especially boasted about the protection they had against crashes and losses of data.
How data is handled
Now, every chunk of data stored in the memory of the computer is divided into two types the volatile memory that usually stores data in the random access memory (RAM) that is usually as soon as the machine losses power, it is the memory that is accessed by the processor of the computer and it uses the diode to store data. The non-volatile memory stores data such that it retains even when the machine is no longer powered SSDs and HDDs are used to store this type of data.
What is an SSD?
Since we have talked about all the preliminaries, let’s pay focus to what is an SSD and how does it work better than a usual Hard Drive. The SSD in crude form can be thought of a thumb drive that has greater storage and much faster speeds. Thumb drives use a PCB that houses some transistors and NAND cells to store data, and it does not require power to maintain data.
There are two types of gates that allow the transistors to store data NAND gate and NOR gate, the NOR gate connects the cells in parallel form and thus requires more space and wires, while the NAND gate connects the cell in series and require little wire to connect. That is the reason why we see NAND cells in our thumb drives and their spiritual successors SSDs they are much faster, and a huge number of NAND cells can be concatenated easily with fewer wires and space compared to the NOR cells. Interestingly, we also have some storage devices that have NOR cells due to their potential of storing rigorous data and are more used in a coding environment.
How does an SSD work?
The working to SSD is completely different than how an HDD works since it does not have a spindle and an arm to work it has a network of transistor that is connected using NAND flash, and they are arranged in rows and columns. The transistors are arranged in such a way that if there is currently flowing through them, then they are in state “1” meaning they are storing data and whenever there is no current they are in state “0” meaning they are releasing data.
Whenever a save function is run with the help of floating gates and controlling gates variable current is applied throughout the SSD and an array of “0” cells and “1” cells is created and files are saved in the cells that are labeled as 1 and the cells that are labeled as zero provide protection for the data since the data must nor disperse in other cells that will make the life of the user far more difficult.
There are different kinds of NAND flash cells according to the amount of data they store the SLC (Single-level cells) stores one bit per cell which means it can store only a single 0 or 1 and the MLC stores two bits per cell which means it can store two combinations of 1s and 0s in each cell. The MLC (Multi-level cells) technology has its disadvantages it wears out quicker than the SLCs but it is mostly used in the SSDs you get these days, and it is very efficient in storing data.
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