Different Types of SSDs: You Need to Know!

how's it going guys I'm Theo Joe now I'm sure that most of you already know about SSDs solid-state drives but you might not know all the ins and outs of the different characteristics and types of SSDs and there are actually a lot of different variations that are significant and you should know about for the next time that you go and buy one otherwise you might not get the maximum speed that each each one is capable of you might waste money on something you don't need or you might just get something that is completely overkill so why don't we go over the different types of SSDs so you can better understand and I'm talking everything from different protocols to connectors to literally shapes and hopefully by the end of this you should better understand it now the first characteristic we're gonna go over is the physical interface basically the physical method of the connection between the SSD and the rest of the computer so a couple examples the two we're going to be talking about are SATA and PCI Express you may have heard of these but I do want to make a distinction when I'm talking about the physical interface I'm not referring necessarily to the connector but rather the method that is used so for example with SATA there are different types of connectors there's the internal connectors and the eSATA external connectors that both you say - but they just look different and the same idea is with PCI Express you have different slots that are different sizes but they still use PCI Express so just keep that distinction in mind that the SATA or PCI Express interfaces might not use the same exact connector every time so anyway the first interface is SATA I'm sure you guys know about this it's super common it's been used in drives for years though it is designed for slower older mechanical hard drives it has a limit of up to six gigabits per second in SATA 3 the latest version so it is kind of slow and it also has lower latency because again it was not designed in the first place with SSDs so it does work with us as T's and if you don't need anything more than 6 gigabits then it'll work but for those maximum speeds you're gonna need something different so that brings us to CIE or PCI Express which is a so-called expansion bus which is basically just a system for connecting different components in the computer so Universal Serial bus USB is for connecting things that's all it is but the thing with PCI Express is it is much much faster and you use this for things like graphics cards I'm sure which has the big slot on the motherboard you're probably familiar with it but you can actually use the PCIe interface for other things besides graphics cards you can use it for storage now the speed of a PCIe connection will depend on how many so called lanes it's using one lane of PCI Express is referred to as x1 and that is just basically one set of connectors however if it's a bigger slot it may combine multiple of those and get faster speeds so for example there's X 4 X 8 and the maximum size is x16 which is about the size you would see if you were to plug in a graphics card to use that whole thing there are different updates and versions to PCIe the latest one is 3.0 and x1 so one lane of PCI Express right now can do 8 gigabits per second so we talked about SATA which can only do 6 gigabits per second and here only one lane of PCI Express can do already more than that but there's even more lanes you could use so you could do x4 which is 32 and you could do x8 which is 64 or you could do 128 gigabit per second at x16 so that is a huge amount of data you can use however much you wanted that depending on how much the device needs and it's also good to know that pretty much every update to PCIe doubles the bandwidth so PCI Express 4 will double all of those values so it is important to know those 2 different interfaces SATA and PCI Express when we're going to be talking about everything in the rest of this video and when you're going out to buy hard drive because you might see that it has a certain speed but if you're not connecting it the right way now you'll understand why you might not get the maximum speed unless you are right so next up we're gonna talk about the different form factors and connectors of SSDs literally the different shapes and sizes so the most common one you saw would probably be a 2.5 inch drive and that is ever since they had hard drives they have 2.5 inch hard drives and SSDs as well but most of these are going to be SATA drives so typically if you see one it's just gonna be a maximum of that 6 gigabits per second 4 SATA 3 and that will give you a theoretical maximum of about 750 megabytes per second however in real life with overhead you might only see around 600 megabytes per second as a maximum if you're using a regular 2.5 inch SATA SSD which most of those are so again if we want those maximum speeds we're gonna have to start using PCI Express so the next option is a PCI Express expansion card form factor for an SSD which is literally just an SSD you plug directly into one of those PCI Express ports that is like the slot that you put into a graphics card and that's gonna give you as much speed as you need so typically it'll probably be either X 4 or X 8 and there you will not be limited by the connection at all and like I mentioned most of these are just gonna be X 4 that's 32 gigabits per second more than you would need in most SSDs although there are some like this super expensive intel SSD that plugs directly into an X 8 slot or uses X 8 lanes you can plug it into a bigger slot if even if it doesn't use all the pins but that's like several thousand dollars so you can spend the money if you want but X 4 is probably enough now this next form factor is pretty interesting it's relatively new and that is m dot 2 you may have heard of this and it also refers to the m dot 2 connector it's kind of both the form factor and a connector and this does actually use pcie express it uses four lanes although it does also supports a DES and USB 3 interestingly so you don't necessarily have to plug in an SSD into an m dot 2 slot although it does suit that very well and the nice thing about m2 drives is they're very small I mean the connector itself is very small so usually the whole Drive along with it although you need to keep in mind that usually this connector is attached directly to the motherboard so if you don't have an m2 connector on your motherboard you're not going to be able to use one of these unless you were to get some sort of expansion card that goes into a PCI Express port and then you connect the m-dot to that way but at that point you may as well probably just get a direct PCI Express SSD and forget about the adaptive m2 drives are getting a lot more popular this is usually reserved for the really high end SSDs so for example you can typically get multiple gigabyte speeds of read and write out of this so one specific example is Samsung's 960 pro that'll give you a read speed of thirty five hundred megabytes a second and a write speed of twenty one hundred megabytes a second and you can use that full speed because it does use that x4 PCI Express interface using the MDOT two connector remember we made the distinction earlier on and finally for the different connectors and form factors this one you may not have ever heard of and that is called a u dot two connector and this is basically like a enterprise-grade m dot two and it is also using a PCIe Express x4 4 lanes although it is also compatible with SAS and SATA so if you need to use one of those you can but the real point is to use it with PCI Express so you will see some u2 enterprise-grade SSDs they're usually 2.5 inch for example there are some made by Intel and you might be wondering well why would you use this / m2 what's the advantage well if you think about it and m dot 2 connector is attached directly to the motherboard so you have to only have space for as many connectors and drives as you can shovel that motherboard there's not a lot of space whereas u dot 2 actually uses a wire connector so you could probably see where I'm going with this you can fit a lot more drives on the same motherboard because instead of having to fit the entire m2 or SSD on the motherboard you can just put a bunch of different connectors and then spread out the hard drives externally so you can fit a lot more and also the form factor of a 2.5 inch tribe is better suited for a data center it's easier to hot-swap whereas with MDOT - you typically have to like either snap it off or unscrew it it's not very realistic if you're dealing with a ton of drives typically you are not going to see any you dot 2 connectors on a consumer motherboard maybe if it's like a really top-end one although if you really want to use one you can actually get m dot 2 to u dot 2 adapters that plug into the slot and then you can use an SSD that use that if you want alright so those are the different connectors and form factors now we're gonna get into the different protocols or logical interfaces so you can think of this like the software whereas PCI Express and SATA can be thought of as like the hardware it's the software behind the physical connections now the first of these is the most common older one almost all drives are going to use it and that is a HCI which is the advanced host controller interface and this is very widely accepted software wise although the next one we're going to talk about is gaining a lot of adoption so there's not really any issues but a HCI is pretty old's been around for years it's been used extensively and it was designed though for slower mechanical hard drive that's not really optimized for SSDs specifically it has a lot higher latency than what SSDs are capable of so it's not really ideal so you could still use an SSD with a HCI but if you did you wouldn't be taking advantage of it fully but really that would only be the case if you were using the SSD with PCI Express because if you're using with SATA it's already limited and it doesn't really matter if you're using HCI anyway now the new kid on the block though way better than HCI you may have heard of it is called nvm II non-volatile memory Express and this was designed from the ground up to be optimized and best used with SSDs specifically with pcie express and you can use it either with pcie express slots like the regular ones or the m dot 2 slot that using pci express although you want to keep in mind that if you are putting it into the slots you still need to make sure that it's in nvme mode or else you'll just get that slower AHCI performance if you're wondering specifically how it improves over HCI well nvme has a lot lower latency which means it can process commands a lot sooner because SSDs can deliver it faster whereas before it wasn't really necessary hard drives were slow it took a while to get the information so it wasn't really optimized so much in that area but really there is a lot of optimization with lower latency here also it uses multi-core support better and also more importantly nvm a takes an advantage of what is known as parallelism property of flash memory and this is kind of important so let me explain it so with regular old hard drives you might know the construction of them typically it's a bunch of different platters and then there is a read and write head on each one and then the actuator will move the drive heads back and forth so it can read data on the drive as it's spinning now each drive head is not independent it has to be all connected to one actuator and because of the physical nature of the drive that means it can really only read one piece of information from one platter at a time because it can only control one actuator so it's not really good at getting a bunch of different information simultaneously which means that hc' I didn't ever account for something like flash which can access multiple parts of information at once because with flash memory instead of having to access one platter at a time you have multiple multiple flash memory chips on one solid-state drive and all of those can deliver data to the controller at the same time so it can access a lot more information so you probably see how Envy me with being able to take advantage of this parallel access of information it's going to be able to process a lot more information simultaneously at lower latency and it's just going to do a better job and that's kind of where the multi-core support comes into play as well it's just gonna use the properties of flash memory to its fullest where HCI was never designed for any of that so I guess we can quickly sum up what we just talked about by saying that if you want the maximum performance out of an SSD you want to get one that either is a PCI Express expansion card or one that plugs into m dot two and you want to enable nvme mode instead of HCI assuming your motherboard does support it now finally not only are there different shapes and sizes and connectors of SSDs but now there are actually multiple just overall technologies used and totally different architectures not just flash memory anymore the first we can talk about is flash memory obviously quickly Marty no I'm sure a lot about it it's non-volatile which means that unlike Ram if you turn off the computer it can store the data it's electronic solid-state there's no moving parts unlike a hard drive and even though it is very very fast it's not quite as fast as RAM actually it's much much slower than Ram just much much faster than a hard drive now besides flash though the other new one is Intel's new 3d crosspoint or X point technology which is different than flash and they're using this in their obtain branded SSDs and this is actually faster even than flash memory it's a totally different structure than traditional flash so I'm not really gonna get into the whole details of how exactly it works that would be an entire new video but just know that this is out there and this is actually a lot closer to RAM speeds apparently it's about 10 times slower than Ram but a thousand times faster in terms of latency than regular flash memory so it can do a lot faster operations a lot more operations per minute even though necessarily the read and write speed isn't enormous ly faster there are a lot of situations where lower latency is very important and another really good advantage is the endurance the write endurance now if you didn't know flash memory and regular SSDs can only be written to a certain amount of times before those flash memory cells start to degrade and don't really work as well and that usually is gonna be more than a regular person would use their computer for but if you're using it for something like a scratch disk where for video editing it's reading and writing a ton of data constantly then that could be an issue so obviously with something like obtain where it can read and write a thousand times more over the course of its life you're not gonna have to worry about that obtained drives are actually available right now either as m dot 2 or pcie express although I will say that for 99.9% of people it's definitely overkill like I mentioned for maybe a scratch disk or something it could be useful in very specific situations although it is clearly better than flash memory so we could see maybe over the course of the next several years that actually taking over and being the choice of storage if they can increase the amount of storage limit in those drives and bring down the price as well however I'm not sure if it will totally take over ever because it is a proprietary technology so unless other manufacturers come up with their own similar thing then it's probably gonna be a lot cheaper still always to buy flash memory so we'll have to see but with that I think we have covered pretty much all the different variations and types of SSDs you might come across and hopefully now you should have a much better understanding of which one you might want to go for the next time you build a computer or even just upgrade your drive and who knows maybe if you're already using like a MDOT to drive you may realize oh my gosh I didn't have it in nvme mode and you haven't been getting those maximum speeds that you could have so you'll have to look up how to change that anyway I hope this was helpful to you guys let me know down in the comments what you think if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos right here you can just click on those and if you want to subscribe I make new videos every Tuesday Thursday Saturday and also be sure to enable notifications by clicking the bell next to the subscribe button or else YouTube probably won't even show you new videos even if you do subscribe the algorithm is really junk anyway again I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys so thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time have a good one

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 133,770

Rating: 4.8873367 out of 5

Keywords: technology, tech, ssd, solid state drives, nvme, m.2, nvme ssd, what is nvme, what is m.2, nvme vs m.2, m.2 ssd, computer hardware, storage, solid state drive, solid-state drive, pcie ssd, sata ssd, best ssd, best solid state drive, pci express, computer, pc

Id: ppeSIaDupSQ

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2018