Solid State Drive | Best Laptop Upgrade
Solid-State Drive
Today’s computers have plenty of RAM, video graphics, and processing power to complete even the most demanding tasks. However, there is one component that continues to create a large bottleneck in the performance of even the most high end machines. This component is the standard, platter driven hard drive. But thanks to Sold State Drives (SSD’s), platter driven hard drives are quickly becoming obsolete.
Standard hard drives are built with a “platter” that stores information. In most standard hard drives, the platter spins at either 4200RPM, 5400RPM, or 7200RPM. While the platter is spinning, the “head” scans the platter to retrieve data from the drive as well as write data to it. As you can imagine, the slower the rotational speed the longer it takes to read/write from the drive. The decreased read/write speed can drastically slow the performance of your computer.
Solid State Drives, on the other hand, utilize Flash memory to store data. Since Flash memory does not require a constantly moving platter or a head to read/write the data, the speed at which data can be read from or written to the drive is increased dramatically. Also, unlike platter driven hard drives, SSD’s require a lot less power consumption. In turn, SSD’s allow your computer to run cooler and use less power (increasing battery life in laptops).
After installing an 80GB Intel X25-M SSD in my Macbook Pro I instantly noticed many benefits such as:
- Boot time decreased from ~35 seconds to ~10 seconds
- Photoshop CS5 now launches in ~2 seconds as apposed to ~5 seconds with the standard hard drive
- Absolutely no lag when opening, editing, and saving projects in Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator
- Internal temperature decreased by ~10C on average
- Battery life increased by 30-40 minutes under standard working conditions
While the price per GB on SSD’s remain a bit high, they have already began decreasing quite a bit since their initial release. If you are looking to upgrade your current computer or plan on buying a new computer in the near future, I highly recommend an SSD as a priority upgrade.
