Solid state drives (SSD) are a relatively recent piece of technology that is slowly becoming more standard in the computer market, replacing hard disk drives.
SSDs are a very fast piece of technology that changes what we can do with computers, especially with mobile devices like tablets and laptops.
To understand the significance of an SSD, it’s important to understand the older hard disk drives (HDD) that most computers still use today.
HDDs are inexpensive and provide a large amount of space in a single drive. The speed of an HDD varies, but is very slow when compared to an SSD.
Since HDDs are cheaper, it is more reasonable to have large RAID of drives connecting to one another for backup purposes.
HDD are mechanical in nature in that it is a rotating disk spinning very fast with a single needle reading the information off of the disk.
Anything mechanical like this breaks down over time with wear and tear. If a laptop with an HDD gets hit or tilted at the wrong time, this can cause the HDD to break. For more portable and on the go devices, SSDs will not break nearly as easily as HDDs.
The biggest “pro” for SSD over HDD is the speed of an SSD in reading information.
For most computers, loading up Windows will take about a minute or much longer. With an SSD installed, Windows can load up in seconds. SSDs are about 10X faster than HDDs, possibly more depending on your set-up.
Having programs like Word and Excel open up instantly can drastically change your workflow and productivity. Having a faster drive means nearly everything you load from your computer will run faster as an SSD does not need to search for information like an HDD.
SSDs are still expensive when compared to HDDs, but are becoming cheaper with time. Currently, I can find a 500GB SSD for about $230 while a good HDD for the same space is about $100, so SSDs are little over twice as expensive as HDDs. Additionally, most HDDs will not fit into a laptop while all SSDs can fit into laptops.
If you wanted to upgrade to an SSD from an HDD, there is a cloning process where you can directly copy your drive information over to the new SSD as though nothing was ever changed other than the drive. This process would keep all of your programs and information and gain all the speed that comes with having a SSD.
If you want faster load times on your computer, have a laptop that moves around often, or you want Windows and Windows programs to start up almost instantly, then you want to upgrade your device to an SSD.
If you want a lot of storage with less expense but you can handle having slower speeds, keep your HDD. If you are interested in upgrading your computer but aren’t too sure yet, give us a call at Tech Experts and we can help.