MEPX
Chapter 4 of 10All chapters
  1. 1The parts
  2. 2The processor
  3. 3Memory
  4. 4Storage
  5. 5Graphics and parallel work
  6. 6Motherboard and buses
  7. 7Power and cooling
  8. 8Finding the bottleneck
  9. 9Laptops and phones
  10. 10Choosing hardware

Chapter 4 of 10

Storage

Where things live when the power is off.

Drives

A hard drive stores data on spinning platters and is cheap per terabyte. An SSD has no moving parts and is far faster at random access, which is what most everyday work is.

  • NVMe drives connect over PCIe and are faster again than SATA SSDs.
  • SSDs wear out with writes, though modern ones outlive their usefulness.

Losing data

Every drive fails eventually and gives little warning. RAID protects against a drive failing; only a separate backup protects against deletion, ransomware or fire.