Solid-state drives are up to ten times faster than a traditional hard drive, but not only do they offer faster data transfer speeds, they also weigh less, produce less heat and are more resistant to shock, which makes them ideal for use in laptops.
Even today, its economic cost per gigabyte is already equal to that of conventional disk drives in their heyday, something that allows them to be purchased without investing much money.
An example of this is given by the market price of solid state drives from manufacturers such as Kingston or Crucial; around 10 euro cents per gigabyte.
The SATA connector and the M.2 connector
However, doubts may arise regarding its mounting in a laptop, since there are two types of connectors for this class of units: the SATA connector and the M.2 connector.
In this regard, it should be noted that the SATA connector is the standard connector for internal drives in 2.5-inch format commonly used in a laptop, while the smaller M.2 format requires a specific port, which also has been adopted by new storage units based on the NVMe (NVM Express) protocol.
What does NVMe mean?
NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express, a protocol expressly developed for Flash storage devices, which outperforms storage based on spinning components.
It is also expected that it will become the standard in its sector in a very short time. However, NVMe storage drives also use other connection methods, such as PCIe and U.2, depending on the computer’s hardware configuration.
But the most common form factor for NVMe drives targeting home consumption is M.2.
Photo: https://www.kingston.com/