Upgrading to a Solid State Drive (SSD)

My computer is six years old and its tiny 150GB hard drive was maxed out. So I finally pulled the trigger and decided to upgrade to a 500GB Solid State Drive (SSD). For those of you who do not know, a solid state drive is like an over grown USB thumb drive but it goes inside your computer where your old hard drive use to be. It does not have any moving parts or spinning disks so its ability to read and write information is infinitely faster. Well maybe be not infinitely faster, but 3x to 5x faster. Not bad for $185 in parts.

The upgrade took about 3.5 hours but only needed about an hour of my attention. The other 2.5 hours were spent on the hard drive cloning process, which did not need my involvement. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the cloning process was and even though I ran into an error during my first attempt, it was quickly remedied. That is the good news. Here is the better news. My computer now runs faster than it did when it was new. It takes less than 10 seconds for it to fully boot. Not just to show the desktop but to finish loading all the background programs as well. Additionally, all my programs load and run much faster. I’ve taken the waiting out of my computer experience.

Now keep in mind, I bought this computer with the best processor available at the time. That is why I was able to get six years out of it before getting frustrated with its performance. So if you have an older computer with an i5 or i7 processor and want to buy some more time, I highly recommend this upgrade.

Thoughts on “Upgrading to a Solid State Drive (SSD)

  1. Absolutely. In fact many desktops are configured that way out of the box. A good way to keep the system running fast and having plenty of room to store your data. However, I am amazed how quickly the price of SSDs are coming down. One day the conventional HDD will be the new Floppy.

  2. There’s another option here, if your choice is limited to a conventional hard drive. “ Hybrid” drives combine a large, standard hard drive with a small cache of flash storage . This won’t magically make your hard drive as fast as an SSD, but the file caching can make a considerable improvement if you’re constantly accessing mostly the same programs and files. It might be worth the small price premium versus a standard hard drive.

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