How an SSD Will Make Life Faster
Does your computer or laptop feel really slow? While the performance may seem alright at first it can often feel slower and slower as the time goes by. Laptops are usually outfitted with a HDD (hard disk drive) that runs at 5400 RPM(revolutions-per-minute) unlike desktop-grade hard drives that run at 7200 RPM to offer more performance. Laptops have those types of hard drives to decrease noise and heat.
A hard drive can actually be one of the major bottlenecks of a computer. Let’s say you are downloading a file to your computer. If you have fast internet you’re going to have to wait for your laptop or computer’s hard drive to catch up to the speed at which the file is downloading. This is where an SSD can come in to help.
An SSD (Solid State Drive) is a storage drive that offers much faster speeds than a conventional hard drive. It does not have any moving mechanical parts and stores the data in microchips. A hard disk drive has a spinning platter that a read/write needle has to touch to access data. They also have to be defragmented (reduces the amount of fragmented data which happens when you write large files to the drive) from time to time. SSDs do not have to be defragmented and in fact if they did it would damage the SSD.
Samsung’s EVO and Pro line of SSDs have become the most commonly bought SSD for consumers because they are very reliable. For example their 850 EVO offers Read/Write speeds of up to 540MB/s and 520MB/s. This helps decrease the time it takes to boot up a computer. Samsung are also offering SSDs that plug into a different port on the motherboard called a M.2 slot. Not all motherboards have this though so you will have to check whether or not it does. M.2 SSDs offer even faster speeds than an SSD that connects to your computer via a SATA cable. If we use Samsung’s drives as an example again and look at their 950 Pro M.2 SSD we see that they are advertising Read/Write Speeds of up to 2500 MB/s and 1500 MB/s. Compared to the previous example you can see that M.2 drives are significantly faster.
With these kinds of speeds you’ll be able to see an improvement in boot time (time it takes for you computer to turn on and get to the login screen), loading times in videos games, and in video editing. You’ll also see applications opening faster and improved search times in the computer’s file explorer.
So why aren’t all hard drives replaced with solid state drives? It’s because SSDs are much more expensive in the dollar/gigabyte ratio. Western Digital’s 1TB hard disk drive is $0.05 per GB while Samsung’s 1TB EVO SSD is $0.318 per GB. This puts Western Digital’s drive at around $50 while Samsung’s drive is around $318.
Buying an SSD to have in your computer or laptop is one of the best upgrades you can perform, but it can set you back quite a sum depending on what capacity you decide to buy. Either way an SSD is going to work wonders for giving an old computer or laptop a little bit more life.
