Dec 10 2009
Is It Worth To Switch To A Solid State Drive?
Every one of us knows it: You turn on the computer and have to wait until the boot process has finished. Depending on your computer hardware and installed operating system this can take a while. Now this annoying task can be eliminated by using a Solid State Drive (SSD).
SSDs are not much faster than regular hard drives in general. Compared to a 7200rpm hard drive their faster when reading data but slower while writing - even compared with a 5400 rpm drive. So when you have lot of read operations a SSD is a good choice. For instance: the boot process at startup is a read process and with a SSD your computer will be ready for work much faster. When your job requires a lot of writing data, you should stay with your hard drive. But what should you keep in mind when you want to switch?
First take a look on your hard drive interface. Older computers use IDE or parallel interfaces. When your computer has this type of interface a change is not worth to switch, as this will still be your system's bottleneck. When you have a Serial ATA interface you're fine.
When your computer is a desktop PC, your hard drive size will be 3.5". Notebooks usually have a 2.5" or 1.8" drive build in. Open the computer (of course turn it off before and take out the plug) carefully and unplug the existing hard drive. Install the SSD and connect it. After installation, go to your BIOS and start the hardware identification so that your computer will recognize the new hardware.
Although the price for SSDs has decreased a lot regular hard drives are still much cheaper and you get bigger sizes. Additional to the faster reading, SSDs have a lower battery consumption, which can keep a notebook a few hours on, compared with a regular drive. Take a few minutes to think if it's worth to switch or if it's better to wait a bit longer.
Dominik Sapinski is senior project manager at soft-evolution, a europe based software company and innovative provider of Pimero, a team scheduling, task, email, note and contact manager.
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