SSD Hard Drive: A True Speed Upgrade Compared to HDD

A few years ago, when talking about upgrading your hard drive, it was mostly done to increase storage space. You could definitely squeeze out a little bit more speed with some hard drive upgrades. However, when going from SATA to SATA, it was tough to see any major speed changes. Now that the SSD hard drive is on the market, you can see a very noticeable computer performance increase when upgrading from a SATA or older hard drive to a SSD drive.

Speed: SSD versus HDD

The question we get asked most often about SSD hard drives is "how much faster is an SSD hard drive when compared to a SATA hard drive". We had a chance to sit down and do a few tests and were pleasantly surprised how much faster our computer was after this hard drive upgrade.

First, we looked at start up times. We noticed close to a 100% improvement in start-up times on our test machine. We went from a 40 second start-up time to a 20 second start-up time. This was when performing a cold boot. A restart was also close to 50% faster when using the SSD hard drive.

Next, we tested our read and write times for the 2 disks. Yet again, we observed huge performance gains when using the SSD hard drive. We saw the hard drive speed more than double when going from the SATA drive to the SSD drive for both reading and writing to the disk.

Price: SSD versus HDD

When it comes to price, older SATA hard drives are much less expensive. SSD hard disks are starting to come into a more affordable price range, but if you need a lot of space and you are on a strict budget, an SSD hard drive may not be for you. This does not mean that an SSD upgrade is a bad idea though.

If you are looking to upgrade and you don't need much more space than what you already have, we would recommend installing Windows and your most intense programs on a SSD hard drive, and then keeping and using your old hard drive for storage of files, pictures, videos, etc. This way, you can get the performance benefits from the SSD drive while not sacrificing the amount of space you have.

Conclusion

Generally speaking, there is no doubt that upgrading to a SSD hard drive will improve computer performance. The question is if this upgrade is worth it to you. One more thing we want to point out is that we are all about the best bang for the buck upgrades. If your computer is slow, it is worth looking at a memory upgrade before upgrading your hard drive since this is the best bang for the buck hardware upgrade option, at least until SSD hard drives come down in price a bit more.

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-By Dominic

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