FLASHING FORWARD

THE BIG QUESTION, FOR MORE THAN ONE REASON: DO YOU NEED TO UPGRADE TO AN SSD?

THERE’S NO HARD DISC DRIVE spinning away in your phone, so why should there be one in your laptop? That’s the sales pitch that WD is giving with its latest SSD collection. The company circumvented R&D into the world of NAND flash storage by acquiring Sandisk about a year ago. Its new Green, Blue and Black drives are the fruits of that union.

Drives Green and Blue both come in SATA connection configurations, making it easy to swap out your old 2,5-inch or 3,5-inch HDD. The pair also come in the tech-bridging M.2 2280 (22 mm x 80 mm) size for forward compatibility with the new PCIE ports. At the top end is the Black drive, which services only the PCIE market with an NVME (non-volatile memory express) connector.

What does this mean? There’s a WD SSD for every consumer.

HDD vs SSD

Essentially they both continue to store data even when not powered. It’s just that the HDDS use circular platters and a reader/writer, whereas SSDS use interconnected flash memory chips. In the case of an HDD, the data is stored on a magnetic coating on the metal discs and the drive must spin to get the correct part of the disc to the reader to deliver the data needed by the application. Drives can get corrupted with damage to the discs, or even break, if the moving parts seize or get knocked out of alignment.

Flash memory is more like a set of containers for storing the data over time, with many reads and writes, there’s an electron build-up within each container and the drive can corrupt that way. Still, the modules are largely immune to physical shock from drops and dense enough to far outshine HDDS for storage-to-weight ratio.

SSDS are the current best option for file storage, but the cost means you should invest in a reliable mass storage drive on which to dump your data. Green is for the first-time SSD user, offering 540 Mbps read and 405 Mbps write speeds with endurance to handle 40 TB written to disc (TBW) on the 120 GB drive and 80 TBW on the 240 GB version. Unless you’re using it to log data from MEERKAT, that should last you a good number of years. From R800 Blue offers improved write speed of around 500 Mbps, so it’s better for multitasking, and endurance of 100, 200 and 400 TBW on the corresponding 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB storage volumes. From R1 430