Over the last couple years I’ve been finding more and more people converting over to Solid State Hard Drives (SSD) in their computers. No matter what drive, size or model of SSD people have chosen, everyone talks about a huge increase in performance. As you can imagine, being a big computer geek a solid state drive is something that I’ve had on my wishlist for quite some time. I was lucky enough to get one as a gift for Christmas.
After I installed the drive into my desktop and completed the re-install of Windows, right away I was amazed at the performance increase I was seeing just with boot time alone. Since I was working with a fresh copy of Windows with no programs installed, I contained my excitement until I was fully back up and running. I completed the install/configuration my regularly used programs, migrated back my user data (profile settings, etc) and then rebooted the computer – I was surprised to find that the system boot time was still operating at an amazing speed. As I started to open/close applications I found that even these simple tasks were happening at what felt like lightning fast speeds. I decided to do a stress test, so I opened several resource-heavy programs at the same time and not once did my computer seem to bog down – I was impressed.
Being that SSD drives tend to be only affordable at smaller volumes, with the amount of data I have I had no other choice but to keep my regular 1TB drive in the system for data storage. Since my applications/system installs are on the SSD and my data for the programs is on my regular drive I thought I wouldn’t see a performance increase unless I copied the data over to work on it – I was wrong. As I opened podcast files, photo files and a variety of other large data I found that my load time was still grossly faster than before I had the SSD and I realized why. Most of these resource-heavy applications use temporary directories (sometimes referred to as scratch disks) to work on the projects and since I set these directories to my SSD, the computer ends up still working of my SSD. To give you an idea, when I opened up one of my project files using my new SSD, it opened in around 30 seconds; however, before I literally had time to go to the kitchen, get a drink , talk to the wife, then come back. The performance increase is once again, truly amazing.
If you’re looking to do upgrades to your computer and only have money for one item I would highly recommend getting a SSD. While over the years my first recommendation for upgrades used to be RAM, going forward I’ll be suggesting solid state as the first. There is a word to the wise though – if you’re going to be using anything but Windows 8, make sure you research how to install Windows on an SSD as there are things you MUST turn off or else you could lose your data or wreck your drive.
