GIGABYTE PC DIY Guidebook March, 2015 | Page 10

Chapter 1 : Introduction Introduction SSDs Solid State Drives, or SSDs, store data on solid NAND memory chips as opposed to a mechanical spinning disk and have become increasingly popular with DIY PC builders when building desktop PCs due to their vastly superior read and write speeds compared to traditional mechanical hard drives. Recent drops in pricing now mean that the majority of DIY PC builds employ an SSD for the OS. While SSD capacities remain fairly limited compared to regular mechanical hard drives (most common capacities are 64GB, 128GB and 256GB), most users choose to install the Operating System and a few selected applications on the SSD which vastly improves overall system responsiveness (especially with large applications like Photoshop or 3D game titles). Most users also use a much larger 7,200rpm hard drive (above) f ܂