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What makes SDD drive faster than other Drives

I know that SSD drives are faster than regular drives, but I am not sure what makes them faster.
I know that there is RAID 0 (Striped)used on the servers, that makes Writing faster(Not sure about reading if it is fast) however it requires at least two separate drives.

SSD I believe it is a single drive but fast. I need to understand what makes it faster.

Thanks

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Ken Butters

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Joe Winograd

It is faster because it is solid state memory, meaning there are no moving parts. A standard hard drive has rotating platters (typically at 5400 or 7200 RPM for PC drives) and a read/write head on an actuator arm. So it takes time for the rotating platter to reach the point where the data is that you're accessing and time for the actuator arm to move in and out to position the read/write head in the correct location for the data. None of this exists in SSDs — it is all just memory chips, so access time is essentially the same — and fast, if it's a good quality SSD. Of course, just as main memory (aka RAM - random access memory) access times can vary based on the speed of the memory, so, too, can SSDs have different speeds. A web search for SSD will give you plenty of info to study, and the Wikipedia article is a decent place to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

Regards, Joe

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Gary Case

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jskfan

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Thank you Guys!

Joe Winograd

You're welcome. Happy to help. Regards, Joe