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Hardcore Gamers

512 GB

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Capacity 512 GB
Interface SATA III
Form Factor 2.5"
4KB Random Read Up to 100,000 IOPS
4KB Random Write Up to 90,000 IOPS
Max Sequential Read 550 MBps
Max Sequential Write 520 MBps
Warranty 10 YR Limited Warranty Parts & Labor

How an SSD Improves Your Gaming Experience

There's much more to the gaming experience on a PC than simply playing a game. There is a whole machine to consider with numerous components that must work in tandem to project a game onto your monitor and deliver smooth performance. Hardware has the power to dictate your experience as much as gameplay.

Whether firing up a game, loading a saved file, or entering a new zone in an MMO, solid-state drives make the task of loading data much quicker when compared to their mechanical counterparts, due largely to their superior read performance.

Superiority through engineering

The reason for the superiority of SSDs is their more advanced engineering. Mechanical hard drives can only read data as fast as their platter disks can spin and the read head can traverse the surface of those platters. Since the read head is mounted to an arm, the head can only read as fast as the arm can pivot. The disks are also in constant motion; though they revolve thousands of times per minute, the read head requires precise timing with the spinning platter to access the data it seeks.

Mechanical hard drives also have a tendency to scatter stored data over time at the bit-level. Since data is stored magnetically across the surface of a platter, data bit-by-bit can be moved around the platters as needed by the operating system. The result is fragmented data.

Mechanical drives suffer fragmented data

Though a game installed on your computer appears to be stored in the same location within a directory, the physical data is commonly scattered across the drive. That fragmentation of data forces the operating system to search all over the drive to read data from a single directory, increasing access latency and associated delays.

On screen these two aspects result in longer loading times, diminishing load performance over time, and more waiting on your behalf to get into a game.

Solid-state drives don't suffer these limitations. They have no moving parts and data is freely accessible at any time since your operating system is not dependent on a medium in motion.

It is that nature of SSD engineering which leads to the most noticeable performance improvement. Akin to a CPU or RAM, a solid-state drive uses transistors packed together in cells of memory. When compared to mechanical hard drives, the flash memory utilized by SSDs is lightning fast. While HDDs can take many milliseconds to access a particular bit of data, SSDs can do so under a millisecond.

At the bit level both devices operate with a speed we don't notice, but when your computer is reading gigabytes of data while loading a game the faster read performance of an SSD can shave seconds to minutes off of load time.

An affordable luxury

Though SSDs were once expensive luxuries, the prices have become much more affordable in recent years. If you are looking to increase the performance of your gaming rig, you'd do well to consider an SSD. The improved load times can be simply amazing, and you probably won't want to go back to a traditional hard drive once you've experienced gaming on an SSD for yourself.