Why upgrade to a SSD
With the advent in the last few years of solid state drives (SSDs) as a viable cost effective alternative to the traditional hard drive (HDD), we are now seeing lots of our customer request an upgrade to their existing machine, rather than what is often an expensive replacement. SSDs are built using the same technology that’s used in USB memory sticks are so work much more quickly than a traditional HDD which has moving parts. The traditional HDD has been around now for over 20 years in its current format and has always been the component that’s most prone to failure. An upgrade to an SSD is pretty much the best performance upgrade you can buy for your computer.
Yes, it’s true that a faster processor, additional memory, and a faster graphics card may notably better the overall system performance, but compared to what an SSD can do, all those upgrades fall behind.
The Advantages of SSDs
There are many advantages solid state drives (SSD) have over traditional mechanical hard disk drives (HDD). The majority of these advantages are resulted from the fact that SSDs don’t employ any moving part in their architecture. In contrast to mechanical hard drives that use motors and moving heads, flash memory chips are the ones responsible for all the storage on a solid state drive. This feature offers faster data access, lower power requirements, and high reliability.
The Disadvantages of SSDs
Upgrading from your current hard disk drive to a solid-state drive seems like a natural thing to do. But before you proceed, you should realise that SSDs are not free of downsides/disadvantages, such as their steep price. As an example, a 1 TB SSD costs in the region of £200 (or £0.20 per GB), whereas the cost of a 1TB HDD is no more than £50 (or £0.05 per GB) which is a big difference.
There’s also the issue of longevity. The type of storage chips used in SSDs can only be used for a finite number of writes. This ageing process only affects the ablity to write to the SSD so all of the data would still be accessible after many years. Most SSDs carry a minimum of a 5 years warranty too.
In our view, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages and we have found that a 3 year old computer upgraded with a SSD, performs as well or better as a new equivalent spec computer with an HDD.
With the advent in the last few years of solid state drives (SSDs) as a viable cost effective alternative to the traditional hard drive (HDD), we are now seeing lots of our customer request an upgrade to their existing machine, rather than what is often an expensive replacement. SSDs are built using the same technology that’s used in USB memory sticks are so work much more quickly than a traditional HDD which has moving parts. The traditional HDD has been around now for over 20 years in its current format and has always been the component that’s most prone to failure. An upgrade to an SSD is pretty much the best performance upgrade you can buy for your computer.
Yes, it’s true that a faster processor, additional memory, and a faster graphics card may notably better the overall system performance, but compared to what an SSD can do, all those upgrades fall behind.
The Advantages of SSDs
There are many advantages solid state drives (SSD) have over traditional mechanical hard disk drives (HDD). The majority of these advantages are resulted from the fact that SSDs don’t employ any moving part in their architecture. In contrast to mechanical hard drives that use motors and moving heads, flash memory chips are the ones responsible for all the storage on a solid state drive. This feature offers faster data access, lower power requirements, and high reliability.
The Disadvantages of SSDs
Upgrading from your current hard disk drive to a solid-state drive seems like a natural thing to do. But before you proceed, you should realise that SSDs are not free of downsides/disadvantages, such as their steep price. As an example, a 1 TB SSD costs in the region of £200 (or £0.20 per GB), whereas the cost of a 1TB HDD is no more than £50 (or £0.05 per GB) which is a big difference.
There’s also the issue of longevity. The type of storage chips used in SSDs can only be used for a finite number of writes. This ageing process only affects the ablity to write to the SSD so all of the data would still be accessible after many years. Most SSDs carry a minimum of a 5 years warranty too.
In our view, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages and we have found that a 3 year old computer upgraded with a SSD, performs as well or better as a new equivalent spec computer with an HDD.
