SLC to QLC: SSD Becomes HDD's Archrival and Eventually Replace It [MiniTool Tips]

With the advantages of high read and write speed, low noise and anti-seismic, SSD to replace HDD is a necessity of this age. But due to the cost and capacity, SSD has not achieved such a feat in its 15 years of development. However, QLC SSD appears and has been able to be even with HDD in capacity and the price is quite low. This means that SSD will replace SSD eventually.

Overview: The SSD of Structure

SSD is mainly composed of a PCB board, main control chip, cache chip, and flash memory. Different from many mechanical structures of HDD, SSD is almost noiseless during the operation process and has good anti-seismic feature due to the absence of motor and the magnetic head.

In the same way, SSD has little seek time, which greatly reduces the response time. Besides, SSD uses flash memory instead of mechanical storage to make SSDS has much faster read and write speed than HDD.

The main control chip is equivalent to the brain of SSD. On the one hand, it allocates the data load on each flash memory chip; on the other hand, it undertakes the entire data transfer and connects the flash chip and the external SATA interface. The main control chip is a factor that determines the performance of SSD.

The other core part of SSD is the flash memory, which is essentially a non-volatile computer storage medium that uses electronic write and read for storage. This is far better in performance and stability than HDD that uses mechanical storage.

Flash Memory

Since 2003, SSD has gradually entered the public domain, and flash memory has gone through four generations: SLC, MLC, TLC, and QLC, per unit storage value is upgraded from 1, 2 and 3 to 4.

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These four types of flash memory complete data storage through the internal insulating layer. When data is written, voltage is applied and an electric field is formed so that electrons can enter the storage unit through the insulating layer to complete the data storage.

With the increase of the voltage state, the access time of the data in the memory also increases, which reduces the read and write performance and stability of SSD.

SSD Becomes HDD's Archrival

Due to the simple structure, high execution efficiency, fast read and write speed, long life and 100,000 times erasing, SLC is very common in enterprise SSD. MLC can be erased 10,000 times, while TLC is reduced to 3,000 times. And QLC can only be erased 1000 times. Even so, QLC SSD may accomplish the mission: completely replace HDD in the future 2-3 years.

As mentioned above, one factor that SSD hasn't replaced HDD is capacity. Ordinary HDD can easily achieve 4tb-12tb in capacity, while SSD capacity is usually between 128GB-1TB, which can't meet users' demand.

However, compared with the previous three generations of SSDS, QLC SSD has achieved 7.68TB in capacity, for example, the capacity of Internet SSD DC P4500 can be up to 32TB.

Besides, another factor preventing SSD from fully replacing HDD is the price. But with the appearance of QLC SSD, the prices continue to fall in recent years. For example, currently, the price of 512GB Internet SSD 660P is only $99.

Final Words

After learning so much information about SSD, you know it is necessary that SSD becomes HDD's archrival and finally, it will replace HDD. If you think the QLC SSD price is OK, you don't have to worry about the life, and just buy it.

You may ask: how to replace laptop HDD with SSD without reinstalling Windows OS? It is quite easy.

Just get MiniTool Partition Wizard, professional hard drive cloning software, and then use it to clone HDD to SSD or migrate OS from HDD to SSD without OS reinstallation. After finishing the cloning, replace the HDD with SSD and set to boot the PC from the SSD.