SSD Solid State Drives - The 2nd best way to speed up your computer

SSD hard Drives

The existence of this website is proof that most people know the best way to to extend the life of an older PC or notebook is a memory upgrade.

But what’s the 2nd best way?

In my opinion, it is the Solid State Hard Drive (SSD). SSD’s have been on the market for a year or two now and have had their fair share of teething problems relating to both reliability and technical issues such as TRIM. However, the latest generation of SSD’s have solved these issues along with substantially improved performance and more affordable pricing.

But what benefits do SSD’s offer?

Solid State Hard Drives are a great option for owners of any notebook or desktop machine looking for a performance boost without spending a fortune. The reason SSD’s make such a difference is down to a few reasons:

1. No Moving Parts: Mechanical hard drives have a physical metal arm which must move across the face of the spinning magnetic disk to find the data you are requesting. SSD’s however, have no moving parts which means their “seek time” is far less than a conventional hard disk.
2. Flash is Faster: Once your data has been found on a conventional hard drive it must be read off the disk. The best desktop hard drives can manage around 80Mb/s. The best SSD’s can achieve 250Mb/s  - 3 times faster than the best desktop drives.
   When comparing SSD’s to notebook drives the differences are even greater, more like 4 times faster!! The story is very similar when it comes to copying data back to the disk “writing” with SSD’s comfortably beating the best magnetic hard drives.

Apart from performance Solid State Drives are also touted as using far less power than a conventional hard drive. This is only true for some drives (OCZ being the best at this time) as most operating systems do not how to get the best out of SSD technology yet. I am sure this aspect of SSD performance will go ahead in leaps and bounds over the next couple of years. Most of us however will happily trade a few minutes battery life for triple the hard drive performance.

What does it all mean in “real world” computing?

Numbers are great, but the real test of any new hardware is how it feels to use everyday. From personal experience I can tell you the feeling is good! I recently installed a 120GB OCZ Vertex II SSD into my 4 year old laptop. I have not done the exact numbers yet but I can say without doubt:

• The laptop boots much faster. My best guess is at least twice as fast.
• Applications load faster. Photoshop starts within a couple of seconds whereas it used to take at least 20.
• Everything is more responsive. Once you have an SSD you suddenly realise how much time you used to spend waiting for things to happen; opening files, saving files, switching applications, sleeping, resuming etc all happens quicker.

In fact, I was so impressed that I created a new website; www.ssdharddrives.com.au.

SSD Buyers Guide:

Best value/performance SSD range at the moment is in the 64GB size range with kits starting at $227 inc GST

Ultimate Performance winners are currently the OCZ range of SSD drives.  The Vertex II models can average more than 250MB/s!