A solid state drive (SSD) is one that uses a type of flash memory (think flash drive on steroids) rather than the magnetic platters a hard drive uses.
As there are no moving parts and thus no rotational delay, it's much faster to access data on an SSD.
SSD's are particularly good for random I/O operations, which are typical of an OS drive. If all you were using the drive for was to store documents, pictures, movies, etc. it would be better to stick with a traditional hard drive as they're much larger and not too bad for sequential access.
So if you can afford it, get an SSD for your operating system and an HDD for your documents and other data.
I've been able to push roughly 170-180MB/s out of that disk; bear in mind my controller is not up to SATA III speeds, although it is a definite difference in my day to day computing and games.
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As there are no moving parts and thus no rotational delay, it's much faster to access data on an SSD.
SSD's are particularly good for random I/O operations, which are typical of an OS drive. If all you were using the drive for was to store documents, pictures, movies, etc. it would be better to stick with a traditional hard drive as they're much larger and not too bad for sequential access.
So if you can afford it, get an SSD for your operating system and an HDD for your documents and other data.
I've been able to push roughly 170-180MB/s out of that disk; bear in mind my controller is not up to SATA III speeds, although it is a definite difference in my day to day computing and games.