Sunday, August 26, 2012

Speed Up Your PC or Apple Computer With A Solid State Drive Upgrade Part 1


Solid State Drive Upgrade Part 1

 

Does a solid-state drive really improve the speed of your system?

Yes, absolutely.  Solid-state drives are extremely fast. They can breathe new life into a PC or Mac computer where the performance is being dragged down by a conventional hard drive. The SSD’s are expensive and limited in total capacity but they may be worth the investment.

Please call iComputer if you have any questions regarding an SSD upgrade.

Conventional hard drives are usually the biggest bottleneck in any computing environment. If you can speed up disk activity, especially the read times, the effects on system startup, application launch times and other data processing actions can be impressive.

SSDs, with no moving parts, have fewer opportunities to break down.  It means that bumping the computer doesn’t risk corrupting the data.  Second, with no moving parts, there is less energy expended, meaning a longer battery life.  Lastly, since the computer can pull up the data immediately on an SSD instead of looking around on a spinning disk, information can be transferred at much higher speeds and computers can start up faster as well.


If a solid-state drive does not have any moving parts, how does it store data?


Solid-state drives do not use motors and magnets instead they use electrical currents.  While a conventional hard drive works by changing the magnetism of sectors on a spinning platter, solid-state drives have lots of tiny transistors.  Instead of magnetism, SSDs use very complex electronics to store and retrieve data. An SSD is very similar to any other computer chip in your computer (such as the processor or CPU), but it only reads, writes, and stores data.

When two identical machines running identical installations; one with an SSD and the other with a traditional hard drive, it is not uncommon for the computer with an SSD to start up in less than half the time of the computer with a conventional magnetic drive.

A new SSD can speed up your computer in several ways:


  • Less power draw, averages 2 – 3 watts, resulting in 30+ minute battery boost.
  • Boot times will be significantly reduced.
  • Around 20 seconds average boot up time.
  • Launching applications will occur almost instantly.
  • Saving and opening documents will not lag.
  • File copying and duplication speeds will improve.
**  Generally above 200 MB/s and up to 500 MB/s for cutting edge drives.
**  There are no moving parts.
**  Because there are no moving parts SSDs are silent.
**  No vibration.
**  Less heat – SSDs have a lower power draw and because there are no moving parts little heat is produced.
**  Overall, your system will feel much snappier.
**  SSDs have a lower failure rate because there are no moving parts and also SSDs are safe from any effects of magnetism.
SSD Disadvantages
  • Cost: Solid state drives cost more per gigabyte than standard hard dives.
  • Capacity: Solid-state drives have smaller capacities than standard hard dives.
  • Slower Write Times: The write times for solid state drives are typically slower than standard hard drives.  Also, SSDs have limited write-cycle lifetimes.
**  Even though SSDs access data more quickly, it takes longer to save data to these drives.  The limited number of write cycles is troubling. Traditional hard drives have almost-unlimited write cycles, meaning that data can be erased and written over and over, again but SSDs’ write cycles are limited.











The final verdict is that SSDs work at speeds that far exceed the performance of conventional hard drives.  Also, they have no moving parts to fail or wear out.  Here’s how to maximize the performance of your Windows PC or Mac computer: (to be continued)
Please call iComputer if you have any questions regarding an SSD upgrade.

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