Is It Worth To Switch To A Solid State Drive?
Dominik Sapinski | December 9, 2009We 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).
Yes – SSDs are much faster at reading data and the daily boot process becomes a pleasure with a SSD. As SSDs doesn’t have a spinning plate inside, their totally soundless. A computer without the innervating sound of the running hard drive? Yes – Now it’s possible! But SSDs have cons, too. The writing process is much slower than on regular hard drives. This means, that the boot process, which is mostly a reading process will be finished much faster, but when you’re doing write extensive tasks your work progress will become much slower. If you’re still fine with this, here’s what you need to do, when switching to a SSD.
The first thing to do is to identify your hard drive controller. You can do this by calling the systems device manager. What you need to benefit from a fast SSD is a Serial ATA interface. If your computer has an older interface like IDE or a parallel one it’s not worth to switch. The controller will become the bottleneck.
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.
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 lead tech developer at soft-evolution, an innovative provider of a free and business PIM software Pimero which adresses the needs of individuals and small companies.
