USB connects everything from external hard drives to keyboards, game controllers, network adapters, and more.

USB comes in many different size variants, but you’ll most likely find it on your computer in that familiar rectangular port. It’s been a standard on most Macs and PCs since the late 1990s and has been updated several times since then. Universal Serial Bus (USB) is the most common peripheral interface used to link one device to another and connect to a power source. We’ll tackle the two most common peripheral devices today-the USB-C and Thunderbolt 3.Īre you unsure what the differences between interfaces are and how they affect your backup plans? This installment of “What’s the Diff” is here to help! What Is USB? Some of these ports and interfaces look alike, but they perform differently. How many different adapters do you use to connect your computer to peripheral devices? There’s USB 3, USB-A, USB-C, HDMI… I could go on. This allows room for the drive to move and delete items without affecting the overall storage capacity.This post has been updated since it was originally published in March of 2019. This process is called wear leveling and happens automatically as the drive is working.īecause the read/write process requires data movement, SSDs are usually overprovisioned with storage there is always a certain amount of the drive that is not reported to the operating system, and not accessible to the user. To further prevent wear on the drive, there is an algorithm to make sure that each block in the drive gets an equal amount of read/write processes. Because there are a finite number of times any block can be rewritten, this is an important process that prevents premature wear on the storage drive. There is another process called TRIM that informs the SSD that it can skip rewriting certain data when it erases blocks.

When the drive is idle, a process called garbage collection goes through and makes sure the information in the old block is erased and that the block is free to be written to again. The data on the old block is copied to a different block, the block is erased, and the data is rewritten with the changes to a new block.Įach time you ask your computer to retrieve or update data, the SSD controller looks at the address of the data requested and reads the charge status. All the data in a block must be refreshed when any portion of it is updated.

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