We all know the sound, when the computer reads the hard drive every morning on startup and we have to wait several minutes until it’s ready for our input. It’s not only the annoying sound of the magnetic head reading data which stresses our nerves. It’s simply the couple of minutes we are forced to wait until we can start working which is frustrating. But there’s a new technology which becomes more and more attractive and which promises a good solution to this daily situation: Solid State Drives (SSDs).
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.
Which size do you need? This is easy. Plug off your computer and open it carefully. When you own a desktop computer you should have a 3.5″ hard drive. Laptops have a 2.5″ or 1.8″ drive build in. Remove the existing drive and connect your new SSD. Then open your BIOS settings (take a look on your computer manual on how to access your BIOS) and start the hardware identification, so that the system will recognize the new hardware.
SSDs are still much more expensive than regular hard drives, but prices are falling every day. So before switching to a SSD take a minute and think if the pros, like faster booting and lower battery consumption, especially on laptops, are worth to spend money for this type of storage.
Dominik Sapinski is lead tech developer at soft-evolution, a software company which has developed the team management software Pimero.
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