Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the main form of flash storage in computers.
Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the main form of flash storage in computers.
They use electrical currents to represent 1s and 0s.
SSDs have significantly faster read/write times than HDDs. They are also more robust because they have no
moving parts.
However, SSDs are more expensive than HDDs (≈10p per GB), and they have a slightly lower capacity.
Also, flash storage degrades over time, as it only has a limited number of read/write cycles, meaning that SSDs are less reliable than HDDs.
Other types of flash storage include USB sticks and SD cards.
Would an SSD need defragmentation?
Tap/click to reveal No, because it takes the same amount of time to read from or write to any memory location on an SSD. HDDs need defragmentation because of the spinning disks: data in adjacent sectors can be read more quickly than data in far away sectors.