You might have heard about the Solid State Drive being better, faster and stronger than the good old standard mechanical hard disk drive – but can you believe the hype?

What is  a Solid State Drive?

A Solid State Drive (SSD) is a non-volatile storage device that stores persistent data on solid-state flash memory.

It’s the latest technology replacing mechanical hard disk drives – where your computer saves all its data – from documents, pictures, music and software to the all-important Windows files that are required to make your computer work.

Read more on Wikipedia about the technical bit here.

STRONGER?
With no moving parts and no mechanics to break, you might be led to believe that SSD are indeed stronger and less likely to break.

And although SSDs are natively more resilient than traditional hard disk drives – they do, unfortunately, still break due to failing electronics, capacitors, firmware issues etc.

Another disadvantage of SSDs is that each data block on the drive has a limited amount of times it can be overwritten (about 10,000 compared to a mechanical hard disk drive with 1.5 million cycles).

This will reduce the performance of a SSD over time.

FASTER?
Quite simply – YES !

SSDs are a lot faster – the difference in performance and improvement in just about every common computing task, including start-up and shutdown, is quite astounding.

If you are interested in the results in some technical benchmark testing, have a look at this article by HowToGeek: Why you need to upgrade to an SSD right now 

BETTER?
With SSDs priced 2-3 times as much as traditional hard drives, you might wonder whether this expense is worth it.

If your computer is performing badly and still only crawling even after a Health Check and upgrading the RAM (the short-term memory), then a SSD might well be worth it.

However, there are ways to reduce the cost by buying a smaller (thus cheaper SSD) and installing it as either an additional drive to only run the Operating System (i.e. Windows) on it and making use of secondary traditional hard disk drives or the Cloud for your documents and pictures.

The difference will be noticeable and performance will be better and faster… and maybe even stronger!

Have PC Harmony,
so you can concentrate on the more important things in life…