3 Reasons Why a Solid State Drive Greatly Improves Your Computer’s Performance

The standard hard disk drive (HDD) has been the data storage workhorse for computers since the beginning of the personal computer. This is because HDD’s are reasonably fast, reliable, and very affordable. But soon, solid state drives (SSD’s) may rapidly take their place.

What is an SSD and how does it differ from an HDD?

Like hard drives, SSD’s store data on a computer. They look almost the same as hard drives, and in fact it takes only a few minutes to switch from an HDD to an SSD. While an HDD has a spinning disk and other moving parts that run the hard disk’s storage, SSD’s use microchips to store data, a technology similar to that used in digital camera memory cards and USB memory sticks.

3 Reasons to switch to SSD

§  SSD’s have faster speeds. Hard drives have to ‘spin up’ before they can read or write your data, and they have to locate that data on its magnetic disk. In contrast, SSD’s have no moving parts and can find and transfer data much more quickly.

§  SSD’s are more robust. When dropped or subjected to sudden shock, they are less likely than hard drives to have a drop in performance or fail altogether.

§  SSD’s use less power. Solid state drives contain no power-hungry motors, so this means that when used in laptops, they can make a noticeable difference to overall battery life, or consumes less current power on desktops.

When a 500GB SSD is matched in performance to a standard 750GB, 5400-rpm HDD on a laptop, there is a considerable performance improvement of around 56 percent when an SSD is used. Even when the comparison uses a tower desktop PC, comparing a standard 1TB, 7200-rpm hard drive and a 250GB SSD, the SSD boosts up PC performance by up to 60 percent. Boot time for computers are also reduced when using an SSD, from 63 seconds down to 23 seconds.

But aside from the obvious performance advantages of SSD’s over HDD’s, solid state drives are far more expensive than SSD’s. For instance, a 500GB SSD may cost around $200, while an equivalent HDD will cost only around $50. Because of this, SSD’s tend to be used only on high-end computers, on servers, or for big businesses or corporations.

Consider switching to SSD for your business or company.

Remember that SSD’s can read and write data faster, so you’ll see particular advantages in situations where you need to manipulate a lot of data such as when using large databases with your customer relationship management system or saving or processing big files such as videos or complex images.

A typical problem faced by growing businesses is a slowdown of their customer database as its size increases. Exchanging the hard drive for an SSD can improve things considerably.