The serious speed demon that is SSD will thrill you
THIS week, I’ll describe an affordable and very effective upgrade that can dramatically improve a PC’s performance.
I’m talking a night and day difference. But before I start that, I promised those of you who have been following my last series on Windows 10 a link to download it as a complete PDF. You can grab it now from www. tinyurl.com/win10series2017.
Upgrade
Are you tired of waiting for your computer to load up in the morning? Do you make yourself a cup of tea while it whirrs away? I can help you fix that.
One of the most rewarding system upgrades you can invest in is replacing a standard hard disk drive with a solid state drive, more commonly abbreviated to “SSD”. You will be amazed at how much faster a computer operates after switching to one of these, and here’s why: A traditional computer hard drive is a small metal box containing a circuit board, some motors and several other bits you can often hear clicking or whirring away.
A hard drive is about the size of a paperback book in a desktop computer, and around half a pack of cards for the laptop version. If you were to open one, you would find it looks a bit like an old record player (in fact, they share common ancestors) complete with spinning platters and a roving pickup arm.
The platters store your data on a magnetic medium, similar to cassette tape or the stripe on a credit card. The roving arm moves frenetically across the rotating platters, reading and writing data all over the place.
The fundamentals of this design have changed little in more than six decades, and although the capacity and performance of hard drives have both increased incredibly over the years, it’s the reliance on lots of intricate mechanical parts that makes hard drives lag far behind SSDs when it comes to read/write performance.
Flash
An SSD looks almost identical to a laptop hard drive from the outside. Inside however, it’s a different beast. An SDD has no moving parts at all.
The data is stored in flash memory, essentially the same stuff that’s used in a portable USB flash drive, but of a higher quality that’s more robust and performs faster.
Although prices have fallen rapidly over the years, the reliance on flash memory makes SSDs a fair bit more expensive than a standard hard drive, and is also the reason they tend to offer less storage capacity for your money than a similarly priced hard drive.
But that’s okay: for desktop users, there’s usually plenty of space inside the computer’s case to install more than one hard drive, so you can have a smaller, cheaper SSD drive as the system’s boot or “C:” drive, containing just Windows and program files, while retaining (reusing) the larger capacity standard hard drive as a storage device for documents and files.
The performance boost comes from Windows and programs not being delayed by the comparatively slower-performing hard drive as everything Windows needs to do its job is being accessed several times faster on the SSD.
Faster
When you turn on your computer, how long does it take from the time you press the power button until the computer is ready? With an SSD, that process can take as little as 15 seconds, perhaps even less if you have a high-performance processor such as an Intel Core i7.
As well as a very fast boot time, you’ll also find programs open faster and respond sometimes instantaneously whereas before you might have sat staring at an hourglass for a few minutes. The difference is astounding.
Replacing a hard drive is not for the faint-hearted – it’s possible, but not risk-free, so you might want an expert to do this upgrade for you.
Alternatively, you can opt for a DIY upgrade, but wait until you’ve read next week’s Switched On before you grab your screwdriver… see you then!