How to use solid state drives correctly?
With the development of SSD technology, solid-state drives are loved by consumers for their extremely high read and write speeds and their ability to significantly improve computer operating speeds. The use of solid-state drives is basically the same as that of HDDs, but some details have not been taken seriously, resulting in many people being unable to truly enjoy the extreme speed brought by solid-state drives during use, and even worse, becoming a burden on computers. Below, the editor will introduce to you how to use solid-state drives correctly so that you can better enjoy the true speed of solid-state drives.
1.Choosing a good interface is a prerequisite
Common solid-state drive interfaces SATA, M.2 and msata.
As a DIY single product, solid-state drives have various products depending on the interface type. When purchasing solid-state drives, you must choose according to computer needs and motherboard interfaces.
Common solid-state drives mainly include three physical interface products: SATA interface, M.2 and msata interface.
①SATA interface
SATA interface is the most common interface type, which is supported by almost all motherboards. It is currently the most mainstream and most abundant type of solid-state drives, and most solid-state manufacturers produce related products. Products with SATA interface mainly implement SATA standard, so there are obvious limitations on reading and writing speed.
②M.2 interface
M.2 interface is an interface native to the motherboard. This interface can be divided into SATA standard and PCIE standard according to different buses, and NVMe standard will be available in the future. The characteristics of M.2 interface products are that the product size is slim. According to different lengths, it can be divided into four products such as 2230/2242/2260 and 2280. At the same time, it has a reading and writing speed far exceeding that of SATA interface, which is the future development direction of solid-state hard disk.
③msata interface
Msata interface is essentially a SATA interface, but it is rarely used in DIY field in multi-purpose notebook computers.
2. Turning on AHCI is the key
AHCI, full name Advanced Host Controller Interface, is a technology led by Intel that can give full play to the potential acceleration function of SATA hard disks and increase the hard disk reading and writing speed by about 30%. When installing and using solid-state hard disks, turning on AHCI can give full play to the hard disk performance.
Current mainstream motherboards basically turn on the AHCI option by default. However, for a few motherboards, as well as older motherboards, you still have to manually change the default IDE option to the AHCI option through BIOS settings.
In addition to being able to see whether the AHCI mode is turned on in the motherboard, you can also use the test software AS SSD benchmark to determine whether AHCI is turned on.
3. 4K alignment can take off
4K alignment refers to a hard disk that has been formatted in accordance with the definition of “4K sectors” and writes data according to the rules of “4K sectors”.
With the development of the times, the capacity of hard disks has continued to expand, making the previously defined 512 bytes per sector no longer so reasonable, so the 512 bytes per sector was changed to 4096 bytes per sector, which is now commonly referred to as “4K sectors”. As NTFS has become the standard hard disk file system, the default allocation unit size (cluster) of its file system is also 4096 bytes. In order to make clusters correspond to sectors, even if the physical hard disk partition is aligned with the logical partition used by the computer, to ensure the hard disk read and write efficiency, the concept of “4K alignment” has been created.
In the era of solid-state drives, if 4K is not aligned, it will not only greatly reduce the data writing and reading speed, but also increase the number of unnecessary writes to the solid-state drive, affecting its lifespan. Therefore, when using a solid-state drive, 4K alignment must be performed first to make the solid-state drive really fly.
In daily life, we can directly use the disk management tool built into the win7, win8 or win10 system to perform formatting operations to achieve 4K alignment. You can also use some professional hard disk partitioning software to achieve 4K alignment, such as DiskGenius (hard disk partition), partition assistant, etc.
The specific operation method has been introduced by the editor before, you can refer to: How to 4K align a solid-state drive? Methods for 4K alignment of solid-state drives
The above is an introduction to the correct use of solid-state drives. I hope it can attract everyone’s attention so that everyone can experience the real speed of SSD solid-state drives.
This article is transferred from “IT Encyclopedia”
