Sunday, September 11, 2011 6:31pm EST
What is an SSD?
As the price of memory continues to decrease as time goes on, it has recently become more cost effective to jam a lot of memory together and use it as a storage device like a hard drive. If you’ve used a USB flash drive or taken pictures and saved them to an SD card, the idea is the same. SSD’s and flash drives use a technology called NVRAM or non-volatile memory, which means that your information stays stored on the card or drive even if there is no power going to it, unlike your computer’s RAM. While they are more expensive byte-for-byte than standard hard drives, the performance gains from using “solid state” storage are significant. If you purchase an SSD drive, you notice an immediate boost in performance on your computer, and it could even give some extra life out of that old computer you’d like to replace.