Solid State Drives
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Pretty much all computers these days come pre-configured with a solid state drive (SSD). The days of the standard hard disk drive (HDD) are more or less a thing of the past, except in certain situations. Although SSDs have been in the market for some time now, prices have significantly dropped the past two years.
Many advantages to them exist: the top two being, (1) vastly improved speed/performance, and (2) better reliability – failure rates are significantly less. Moreover, they do not have the moving parts of the old hard drives (often called the platter-type), so if you do have that bump off your coffee table, there’s less chance of physical damage. And you’ll get some extra battery life too.
There are essentially three types (or ‘form factors’) of solid state drives. One being SATA, which is the rectangular style – 2.5” in size – the same size as the hard drives in laptops. What’s termed ‘M.2’ is what you’d call the second tier (or second fastest). It’s markedly smaller. Quite similar in size is the ‘NVMe’; basically the fastest of the three types. And then the manufacturer HP has in their Z-series Workstations, their unique ‘HP Turbo Drive’ which connects to the PCIe slot. Through the owner’s manual, or checking on-line for your specific system, you can find out which type of SSD your motherboard supports.
These days it is common for users to upgrade their old system to an SSD and have the data copied, or ‘cloned’ over. This will essentially be a mirror image. Files, photos, programs, etc. would then all be on your new drive. If a desktop supports a SATA hard drive, it will be the 3.5” size, and so to put the 2.5” SATA SSD inside, a simple mounting bracket is required.
