When buying a laptop or mini PC, you should not be guided only by the price of the device, as long as you do not regret it at the first opportunity. Not only should you take into account the RAM, but in addition, you should also pay special attention to the storage unit.
Budget laptops and many mini PCs, instead of including an SSD storage drive, include an eMMC card as the primary drive.
The main reason is that eMMC cards are much cheaper than SSDs, this section being where manufacturers save a lot of money, even though both are flash memories.
This is the main reason, a reason which, in turn, is associated with a large number of negative points, which is why, wherever possible, it is advisable to pay a little more to buy a computer with ‘an SSD.
SSD vs. eMMC
Besides the economic reason (reason which allows such cheap equipment), another important difference between SSD and eMMC is found in the reading and writing speed. SSDs (we are not talking about NMVe, which can reach 5,000 MB/s) offer a data transfer speed of between 250 and 500 MB/s, while eMMC cards, the speed varies between 125 and 250 MB /s at best. .
Another important difference between the two types of storage is the ability to store data. While SSDs are available with up to 4TB of storage, eMMC drives can be a maximum of 256GB, a significant limitation if we want to store a large amount of content.
It is important to know the maximum space limits of each disk type since, in the case of eMMCs, these are generally welded to the plate to save space so that we cannot replace them with others of higher capacity, while we can replace an SSD with any other of higher capacity if we run out of space.
eMMC drives are much smaller than SSDs, which is why they are primarily used in small, inexpensive laptops (such as Chromebooks) and mini PCs. Also consumes very little energya compared to traditional SSDs, making them ideal for low-performance laptops.
Not only can we find eMMC storage in very low-end computer equipment, but it is also still widely used by many computer manufacturers. cheap mobile devices. High-end devices have been using UFS flash storage for several years.
This type of disks offers a higher reading speed than eMMc because it allows reading and writing processes to be carried out simultaneously being based on the SCSI architecture. eMMC readers write or read, they cannot do both tasks simultaneously and are therefore much slower.
In summary, one could say that eMMC drives are equivalent to old hard drives, while UFS drives are equivalent to solid state drives (SSDs) in computers.
Most mini PCs and Chromebooks that can be found on the market use eMMC storage and can be found for a little over 200 dollars. If we invest a little more money and opt for a model with SSD, if we need it in the future we will be able to expand the space in addition to offering a higher data transfer speed, which, for many, is the most important. in a new team.
