Should I Purchase A Solid State Drive
The short answer is "YES, spend the extra money and purchase a solid state drive (SSD)."
For years, all components making up computers have been advancing at mind boggling speeds. Since I started working with computers back in 1999, the advances have been simply amazing. Most components inside computers have had a major overhaul; all except for hard drives. Capacity has increased quite a bit and hard drives don’t fail quite as often, however when it comes to speed, we were still stuck with 50 year old technology. For some reason, manufacturers focused on increasing capacity and completely ignored the speed factor.
Technicians had to resort to so many different tricks to try and overcome the great bottleneck. We tried raiding HDD’s, using 10K and even going to SCSI drives at 16k. However, everything we tried put the systems at a higher risk of failure and still didn’t solve the core problem. It simply takes forever to get a spindle hard drive to read and write files.
A few years ago, Solid State Drives (SSD’s) started to show up on the market in high numbers. Like all new technology, it took a few years for SSD’s to become reliable and cheap enough for everyday users. A couple of years back, SSD cost was about $2 per gigabyte and today, SSD cost is down to as little as $0.18 per gigabyte.
To compare it to an HDD, an SSD has only two disadvantages, cost and capacity. Although the cost of SSD’s has been falling like a rock, they are still almost four times more expensive than regular HDD’s. As for capacity, larger sized SSD’s are even more expensive, making HDD’s the easy choice if you need to store a huge number of songs, videos, and pictures.
"It's almost all about speed!"
So, what makes a SSD a good choice? This is where the fun begins, it’s almost all about speed! A SSD by average is about 10 times faster than a HDD. A computer with a HDD that takes three minutes to fully boot and load and in the Solid State Drive the startup programs will only take about 25 to 30 seconds. I’ve had a fresh windows install boot up in 12 seconds. A program that usually takes 45 seconds to load with a HDD will be up in 5 seconds or less with a SSD. In other words, SSD’s are the answer to the instant gratification prayers of the masses.
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