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).
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.
Go to your system device manager and identify the hard drive controller. To benefit from the SSD you need a Serial ATA controller. When you have an older interface like IDE or a parallel one it’s not worth to change, because the controller will become your system’s bottleneck.
The next thing is to get the drive size. Desktop computer usually have a 3.5″ drive, notebooks a 2.5″ or 1.8″ drive build in. The change itself is simple. Just connect the new SSD as you would connect a regular hard drive. After installation you may need to go into your BIOS and run the hardware identification.
Regular hard drives are still much cheaper than SSDs. You get bigger ones for less money. So sit down and think a minute if the benefits of fast reading and lower battery usage overcome the cons of a high initial price and lower write rates.
Dominik Sapinski is senior project manager at soft-evolution, an innovative provider of team management software Pimero.
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