An SSD (Solid State Drive) stores data on NAND flash memory chips and has no moving parts. It reads and writes far faster than a hard disk drive and handles shocks better.
Why it matters
Switching from a hard disk to an SSD is often the single largest speed improvement for an older computer or server. Boot times, application loading and database queries all benefit from lower access time.
SSDs come as 2.5-inch SATA drives, M.2 modules, or NVMe drives on the PCIe bus. Flash cells wear with writes, so drives have a rated endurance.
Example
HDD random read: about 10 ms per access
SSD random read: well under 0.1 ms per accessThese are typical orders of magnitude. A server doing thousands of small reads per second sees the difference immediately.
Common mistakes
- Believing SSDs wear out in months under normal use. Endurance ratings are usually ample for typical workloads.
- Filling an SSD to capacity, which hurts write performance.
- Treating SSD as a backup. It fails like any drive.
Related
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