This month we look at a technology that has been around for some time but has, in the past, been very expensive. Now prices are falling fast and it’s time to start to think about adopting this concept if you want to benefit from both the increase in speed it will have on your computer and to stay ahead of the technology curve (not something that we are always used to doing on the Costa Blanca!)
I am talking about Solid State Drives. These things replace (or at least are placed in addition to) your current PC or laptop’s hard drive and have a vast effect on the speed at which your computer is able to access information, programs etc.
SSDs have historically been quite expensive, however the prices have now dropped – I recently bought a 120 GB drive from Media Markt for just 130 euros and after fitting it and installing Windows 8 (yes I know that I have written about how horrible it is but it’s my job to learn it, however much I think it’s badly implemented!) my computer now boots up in just 15 seconds! Now to be fair my computer is very new and it was always fast – it used to boot up in less than a minute but 15 seconds is a pretty vast improvement.
The speed at which the computer boots up is not really the best thing about SSDs though – ok it’s great to not have to go and make a coffee between pressing the power button and using the mouse for the first time but the real benefit is the day to day use of your computer. Think about how long you wait for Internet Explorer to load every time you want to use the Internet. If you are into photo manipulation, think about how long Photoshop takes to load every time you want it – it loads on my computer in …well let’s test it… 2.1 seconds!
You see the problem with conventional hard drives is that they are comparatively slow because the information has to be read by the computer from a spinning disk and there are inherent limits to that way of storing and accessing information. The read-head on the hard drive has to physically move to the location of the information, wait for the drive to spin round to the right spot and then read the information. With an SSD there is no spinning, no read-heads, the information is just…well there.
Now, of course it’s not as simple as opening up your computer or laptop and pulling out your current hard drive and replacing it with a nice shiny new SSD, you need to be able to (or have access to someone who can) install your operating system (Windows usually) and set your computer up again. So it’s not something to be done lightly, however I’m mentioning it here because it has the potential to have a huge boost in the speed of your computer.
If you are convinced, then there are a few things that you need to bear in mind. Firstly, this is only something that will benefit relatively new computers, and by that I mean computers built in the past 5 years with SATA disk technology, older computers simply don’t have the connections for this type of drive. Also if you do decide to fit an SSD then you should also tweak the settings on your computer to get the best use out of the drive.
Turn off the Disk Deframenter Schedule – defragmentation is something that is particular to conventional hard drives because of the way that information is stored. When using an SSD this is an overhead that is not necessary and the repetitive accessing of the drive could be damaging to your SSD so it’s worth turning it off.
Disable Drive Indexing – again indexing is a technology that has historically been used to speed up access to files stored all over a spinning hard drive. It’s unnecessary on an SSD and again the constant background drive access could be damaging to your SSD, so because it’s sub-optimal and unnecessary it is worth turning off.
There are a bunch of other minor things that are worth doing but are too long to put in this article, so if you decide that you want to give it a go, drop me an email and I can send you the relevant information.