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Storage - The Basics

Storage - The Basics

In this guide I aim to give a brief rundown of what's currently available on the market, good use cases for each technology, and help make things a little clearer for potential buyers.
I'll be looking at internal drives in this article specifically in the consumer space.

Mechanical / Magnetic Drives

When talking about hard drives, most people think of the traditional drive that's been around since 1956. Offering the highest capacities in the consumer space at a reasonably low cost, this type of drive stores data on rotating platters (also known in the industry as “spinning rust”).

Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives or SSD’s have been around for awhile now but have really caught in in recent times due to the increases in capacities.
Where as a traditional hard drive uses metal platters with magnetic coatings to store the information, SSD’s use non-volatile flash memory instead which can offer a number of benefits. performance is the main gain but also they can use less power, put out less heat and are silent.
SSD’s are available in a wider variety of form factors which I will detail further later in this article.

 

Hybrid Drives

Hybrid drives are a hybrid of the standard tried and tested hard drive with the relatively newer SSD.
The integrated Solid State Drive is generally of a small capacity around 16—32GB and is used as a cache. Frequently read data is kept on the SSD portion of the disk for faster access, while the rest of the disk stores the brunt of the information. Whilst you won't get the performance of a full SSD with a hybrid drive, you will generally notice performance gain over a standard hard drive. These drives are commonly known as Hybrid or SSHD.

You can purchase a hybrid drive which combines the SSD and hard drive in one package, which is the most straightforward way, or you can also add a separate small SSD to your system in combination with an existing hard drive.
The SSD will then work as a cache for your existing drive though this is a little more complicated as it requires a specific combination of hardware and software.

Form Factors

2.5”

This is the standard model that most of you will be familiar with. It looks like a standard hard drive and connects to your motherboard via SATA, Delivering good performance and generally offering the best capacity for an SSD.

M.2

The M.2 form factor replaces the old mSATA standard and comes in varying lengths of 30, 42, 60, 80 and 110 mm.
mSATA plugged into mini-PCIexpress slots on older Laptops.

 

 Supported busses for M.2 are PCI-E, SATA and USB 3.0. Check your motherboard when purchasing whilst most will take all three standards some boards will only accept one of them (PCI-E M.2 drives, for example).

I am a big fan of M.2 due to the form factor, these drives are very small and fit into a socket on the motherboard, which means no data / power cables and an overall tidier look inside the computer.

On the PCI-E side of things, the legacy Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is supported for older SATA drives, as well as the newer NVM Express (NVMe) for newer PCI-E drives.

U.2

This is a bit of an odd one, as currently only a single SSD vendor supports the standard, Intel. However, I can see it catching on — the drives are your standard 2.5” form factor and will fit nicely in many current cases out there, the differences being the interface and the cabling.
Essentially, the drives use the same PCI-E 3.0 4x interface that the M.2 drives use, but with a more familiar cable and socket on the motherboard for connectivity. Performance-wise, the drives are on par with the M.2 variants.

In theory, with the right setup you should be able to have more of these hooked up to a single system, but as with the M.2, there is only so much space on the motherboard to put the connectors.

PCI-E

I have already mentioned PCI-E in both the M.2 section and the U2 section, but this is a third type which installs directly into a PCI-E slot just like your GPU does. This is the more familiar PCI-E device. Again expect performance in the same ball park as the M.2 drive and the U.2 drives.

SATA Vs PCI-E

So you're looking for a new drive which one do you choose: SATA or PCI-E? Well, the main benefit of PCI-E over SATA is its performance. Both drives can be a lot faster but will you really notice it in the real world? That depends on the workloads. Windows will load faster and feel snappier on a PCI-E drive, however, with gaming you probably won't notice a huge difference.

SATA also costs a lot less, which may also be a consideration — most people I know who have SATA-based SSD’s are very happy with its performance.

Personally, I use both. I have a small PCI-E based M.2 SSD for Windows and a larger SATA based 2.5” drive for my ever growing Steam collection, and I find this a great balance.

Terms used in this article

Essentially, NVMe is a logical device interface specification that was designed from the ground up for PCI-E SSDs. The specification improves over AHCI in a number of ways in order to make the most of the low latency and parallelisation of PCI-E SSD’s.

  • PCI-E - ‘Peripheral Component Interconnect Express’
    A high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace older less performant standards.
  • SSD - ‘Solid State Drive’
    A hard drive that has no moving parts, allowing data to be accessed much faster than a standard hard drive.
  • NVMe - ‘Non-Volatile Memory Express’
    A logical device interface specification that was designed from the ground up for PCI-E SSDs. It utilises the low latency and parallelisation of PCI-E SSDs to perform better than AHCI
Ryan Munro

Ryan Munro

Staff Writer

Knows more about hardware than safe drinking limits.

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COMMENTS

Platinum
Platinum - 02:25am, 29th May 2017 Author

This article makes me so glad that I bought a tripod for my camera....

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GarySheppard
GarySheppard - 09:26am, 29th May 2017

What about 3" floppies? Theyre' clearly the best, right?

Reply
Platinum
Platinum - 03:19pm, 30th May 2017 Author

Thats not what she told me :(

Reply