Building A Computer – The Hard Drive

These days, if you want a computer to run fast, you need more than the latest and greatest processor. You need a solid state hard drive. SSD is where it’s at.

SSD availability has grown and pricing has shrunk since being introduced into mainstream use a few years ago. This has made it possible for more people to start benefiting from the awesome power of SSD. I have never owned an SSD before so I didn’t know very much about them until I started doing research for this purchase. Like many of the other components, my head started spinning after diving into topic after topic about solid state hard drives.

Right now, there are three different classes of SSD. They are SLC, MLC, and TLC. They stand for Single Level Cell, Multi-Level Cell, and Triple Level Cell. Basically, it means information gets written into the memory in 1 bit per cell, 2 bits per cell, and 3 bits per cell, respectively. They all function the exact same way but SLC is more expensive than MLC, which is more expensive than TLC. You’ll hear a lot of differing opinions about each type of SSD, but most of those opinions are quite outdated. The reliability of SSD has developed so much that the useful life of the hard drives will far outlast the useful life of your CPU.

For the typical user looking for a good price to performance balance, a TLC based SSD will be perfect.

Samsung 840 EVO 500GB Solid State Drive

Samsung has become the most popular SSD manufacturer in the world. They are renowned for the quality of their solid state drives because they are responsible for building 100% of the product in house. SSDs from Samsung have been notable for their performance standards, so when they came out with a TLC based SSD, budget minded nerds everywhere were taking hits from their inhalers.

I probably could have went with a smaller hard drive size, but after studying performance benchmarks I found that the Samsung 840 EVO 500GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-7TE500BW) was the best fit. You can see where an SSD can easily cost more than the CPU of the computer itself, so you really have to be able to justify the expense.

You can save money by buying a smaller SSD to use for the OS and programs, while storing data on regular platter based hard drives. Or, if you are a patient person, you could just use a SATA III internal hard drive (which are really cheap) to be your primary workhorse. My justification is that the performance will equate to increased productivity.

Building A Computer Series

1. The Case
2. The Motherboard
3. The Cooler
4. The Power Supply
5. The CPU
6. The Memory
7. The Storage
8. The Operating System
9. The Graphics Card
10. The Hard Drive
11. The Optical Drive
12. The UPS