Upgrading To An SSD
(A Supplement to Upgrading Your Computer)
Maybe the biggest room for improvement when trying to increase the speed of your PC is to upgrade your Hard Disk Drive (HDD) with an equal-sized or larger Solid State Drive (SSD). The process is very easy when upgrading desktops and most laptops. Some Laptops and All-In-One computers can require removing the back of the computer. Some laptops have special (one screw) doors that allow easy access to changing memory and hard drives.
Benefits
Significant Boost in speed – SSDs are much faster than HDDs. HDDs rely on spinning disks and a moving read/write head like a record player. They must scan the drive with each read/write request made by the OS. SSDs on the other hand use flash memory with no moving parts. This means lightning-fast access. This gives you quick boot times and faster application launches. Every time your system requires information from your storage device, you benefit. SSDs require less power than HDDs making them ideal for laptops.
Sequential vs Random
When your HDD or SSD is required to read or write data it can do it sequentially or randomly. SSDs are more than twice as fast when reading sequentially and over 400 times faster when done randomly.
Just about everything on your PC accesses your storage device. It only makes sense to ensure you have the fastest option available. It can achieve boot times of around 10- 12 seconds. Applications and browsing become faster thanks to the cached files loading almost instantly from the SSD. Included in the reasons for faster data are transfer speeds, lag times, and on-board cache on some models. One way to compare the two is to consider Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS). A 7200 RPM HDD can achieve 90 IOPS but an SSD with flash memory can do more the 400,000 IOPS.
Pricing
To give you an idea of the drastic price drop in storage prices, in 1994 the price per GB was about $1000. In 1997 it dropped to $100, in 2000 $10, and in 2004 $1. They cost $.010 per GB when I received my first one in 2010. Today, they are around $0.01 to 0.014 cents per GB depending on the size purchased.
Summary
Upgrading to an SSD is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase your computer performance.
—
Glad you covered this topic Jim. Several years ago I cloned my HDD to a SSD using AOMEI Backupper. Was required to purchase the Pro version, as cloning was not part of the free version. Not only did the SSD bring new life, but I discovered two little unknown facts. Was able to reuse those HDD’s to store data (backup copy) since the files are small and can be accessed quickly. The other being a SSD can be used as an external (portable) storage device, Mindblower!