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What is a Solid State Drive and its Performance Impact on an Old Computer?

SOS laptop

Upgrading your PC to a Solid State Drive (SSD) can have a dramatic impact on an aging computers, overall usability and prolong its effective life. Many people talk about the performance (or lack thereof) of their desktop or laptop computers. If you have a computer that was purchased over 3-4 years ago, and you see that the memory and CPU seem to be doing ok, but the system is overall slow…consider upgrading to a Solid State Drive.

An SSD is essentially and array of memory chips that can store data like your hard drive but at a much faster read and write speed. This allows for a quicker start up, faster application load times, and more data protection. Another benefit of upgrading to an SSD is that they use less energy which will increase the battery life in your system. The cost of an SSD has decreased over time, but the size has increased making them affordable and usable for end user workstations and laptops.

A normal disk drive has random access times in the 2.9ms (millisecond) to 12ms range. An SSD is normally less than 0.1ms. That may not seem like much but I have actively seen Windows 7 and Windows 8 boot times reduce to under 30 seconds on an SSD vs several minutes on a normal disk drive. Boot times, file saving, shutdowns, all activities that read and write to the disk are quicker.

Converting from a normal drive to an SSD can be easily performed without restaging the PC or reinstalling software. If you have a clean, virus free install of Windows 7 or higher on a normal disk drive, you can use imaging software to copy it to the SSD. By making a small investment in an SSD, you may be able to get another 3-4 years out of your PC.

At Beringer we pride ourselves on solving issues like these for our customers everyday. Please contact us today to see how Beringer can increase the performance of your business.


theProfessor

theProfessor

Rob is the CTO of Beringer Technology Group, and focuses his efforts on software development, cloud engineering, team mentoring and strategic technical direction. Rob has worked with Beringer since 2005, and has influenced every department from Development, Security, Implementation, Support and Sales. Rob graduated with his MBA from Rowan University in 2012, earned his Bachelors of Computer Science in 1997, and is current with several Microsoft technical certifications. Rob is very active, and loves to mountain bike, weight train, cook and hike with his dog pack.