SSDs – or Solid State Drives (not SSDD!) – have finally reached a price point where it makes sense to consider replacing your existing hard drive (HDD) or ensuring your new machine is equipped with an SSD.
The question is, why should we care? Well, if performance is important then the vastly superior performance of SSDs over HDDs will be sure to make your machine much snappier – and I’ve yet to meet a user who does not at some point complain about how slow their machine is. SSDs are generally 2-5x faster than comparable HDDs. For years, our machines’ primary limiting performance bottleneck has been in getting information to and from the drive, and so this means a major increase in speed for everything we do we do with our machines – from startup/shutdown speed, to opening and saving documents – everything benefits!
SSDs have a few more important advantages:
- Less power & weight – a real bonus for laptop warriors in less weight to lug around, plus longer battery life.
- No moving parts, so potentially more reliable – but don’t stop doing backups as it’s still early days to know whether this translates into long term reliability.
SSDs are still about 2.5x the cost of a normal HDD, and I’m sure as soon is the ink is dry on this post, the price differential will reduce even further.
So, rather than going out and replacing your machine ‘cos it’s slow, consider replacing your drive with a SSD.
