Gadgetory

a common piece of advice given to new computer tinkerers is that the single best upgrade you can give especially an older PC is a solid-state drive or an SSD not only because this removes the hard drive bottleneck but also because in general any SSD is going to give you a significant performance boost even if you don't agonize for hours over the exact model you're going to buy and just to end up spending 10 seconds picking out the highest-rated one on Amazon but many of you also have higher performance requirements than simply faster than a hard drive so today we're following up on our guide on which SSD to buy which you can check out here with an explanation of the different kinds of flash memory that you'll find not only in SSDs but also in things like removable memory cards and USB thumb drives so currently SSD flash memory comes in a few main flavors SLC mlc and TLC which you will sometimes find in the SSD product description but unfortunately not always which sucks because these three things could have a huge impact on the performance of your drive but how well the letter C C yeah that way in these varieties stands for SEL as in the memory cells in your SSDs that store data so depending on the type each cell can hold a different number of bits that is the zeros and ones that make up all digital data a single-level cell or SLC can hold just one bit per cell while triple level cells or TLC s can store three bits per cell ml c actually stands for multi-level cell so technically TLC as a subset but n LC is commonly used to refer to two bits per cell so it shouldn't be surprising then that TLC which can store the most bits per cell offers higher capacities in fact their higher data density also makes them cheaper per gigabyte but there a caveat here remember that SSDs only last for a certain number of write cycles and since the electronics in TLC's requires more writes per cell because they store more they don't last as long as NLCS and SLC s and they also tend to be significantly slower for these reasons you will mostly find TLC flash on lower end SSDs and portable storage devices instead most mainstream and higher end consumer SSDs these days use mlc flash which represents a nice compromise between data density longevity performance and price these drives tend to last anywhere between twice to ten times as long as TLC SSDs while being quite a bit faster and while you can't cram as much data on it and they'll see SSD for the same cost they still represent a good value proposition whether you just need a small SSD to use as a boot drive or even something larger form a storage SLC drives due to only storing one bit per cell are even faster still and can last for one hundred thousand right cycles the downside though is you can possibly guess is that they are quite expensive so they're usually only found in enterprise settings where the fastest speeds and high reliability are a must of course there are other important ways that the flash memory in different drives can vary such as more recently with the availability of 3d NAND which uses memory cells stacked in a 3d configuration to significantly increase data density you can learn more about that in this video so while nearly any SSD will give you better performance than your clunky old mechanical Drive deciding between TLC and mlc with SLC not being really relevant to less here you know contract buying thousands of drives at once in a data center can be important if you're really going to be putting your drive through the paces whether you're a Video Editor running a new server or you just like to run benchmarks all the time because your secret aspiration in life is to be just like me speaking of secret aspirations what if you wanted more and you felt like gee if only I could educate myself for just a few dollars a month to take my hobby or even my career to the next level well with lynda.com you can do that lynda.com lets you watch and learn from top experts who are 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