Plain and simple, Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the future of mass storage for computers. After all, the prices of SSDs are dropping like a rock while their capacities continue to increase, a happy combination of circumstances that will eventually send the hard drive the way of the floppy.
SSDs hold a number of distinct advantages over traditional hard drives, the most important being a massive increase in speed. While movable platters and read/write heads will always be encumbered with physical “speed limits”, SSDs operate at the speed of memory chips (because in reality that’s what they are).
Ask anyone who has ever used one and they’ll tell you that a solid state drive is a veritable speed demon compared to a traditional hard drive.
The Windows operating system is a bloated ball of computer code that by necessity takes forever (relatively speaking of course) to load into RAM and become stable enough for you to use your PC. Installing the operating system on an SSD can literally shave minutes off of that load time.
Even better, the Windows swap file is accessed at the same fast speed when it resides on a solid state drive which means you’ll be doing a lot less staring at the little “busy” indicator while you’re using your computer.
Several brands of solid state drives are available these days at increasingly affordable prices. Install one of them in your PC and it’ll seem like Windows has taken its foot off the brakes!
About the author: Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE.COM. He is also an A+ Certified computer technician with over 30 years of experience in the computer industry.