What is an SSD?

Many laptops and desktops used to have a hard drive. Today, almost all laptops and desktops have an SSD.
A Solid State Drive is a digital storage medium that uses memory such as flash or SDRAM. A major difference from traditional hard drives is that an SSD contains no moving parts, such as spinning platters. As a result, SSD drives are much faster, quieter and the risk of errors is almost negligible.

What are the benefits of an SSD?

An SSD is faster, lighter, quieter, uses less energy and has no spinning parts like a conventional hard drive.
An SSD is on average four times faster than a regular hard drive. This allows it to boot your favorite programs much faster, and especially with booting your computer, this makes a big difference. Because an SSD has no mechanical parts, it is much more resistant to shock, which increases reliability. Also, an SSD is much more energy efficient than an ordinary hard drive. In laptops, this means longer battery life. Because of the lack of mechanical parts, an SSD is much quieter than an ordinary hard drive. You will be surprised how quiet your laptop becomes, for example. There are no real disadvantages to an SSD. Currently, an SSD is still comparatively more expensive than a conventional hard drive, but this is offset by the aforementioned advantages.

What is the difference between an SSD and an NVMe?

The latest generation of SSDs is the NVMe SSD. NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory express and incorporates a communication protocol combined with with a new type of connector, the M.2. This makes the NVMe SSD much faster and more compact than an older SATA SSD. The big advantage of an NVMe is that it connects directly to the motherboard, eliminating the need for connecting cables.