Buying an SSD Drive

There have been huge advances in storage solutions in recent years, with prices tumbling and technology advancing by leaps and bounds.  Nowadays hard drives are no longer the objects of occult mystery they were just decades ago.

Currently hard drives are the storage medium favoured by most people, thanks to their reliability, flexibility and low cost. Plus the fact that so much data can be safely stored on them.  However when it comes down to speed, even hard drives have now met their match in the form of Solid State Drives or SSDs.

Speed

• USB keys, music players and memory cards use the same basic form of technology (NAND flash memory), as opposed to the magnetised spinning platters used by hard drives.  Consequently the data can be recovered far more quickly and the information stored on an SSD does not have to be laboriously tracked down.  A PC that has its operating system, say Windows 7, stored on an SSD rather than on a conventional hard drive will boot up in just a matter of seconds.  The total amount of time that can be saved overall is quite staggering when you also factor in operations such as saving high resolution photos and copying large files.

Research

• As with everything else there are compromises to be made when you get to high speed data retrieval, and these can be many and varied, they are the deciding factors when you come to choosing an SSD, and forewarned is forearmed.  So understanding the issues will help you come to the best choice.  After all, not every SSD will necessarily be suitable for your particular requirements. It may even be the case that you don’t really need one at all.  There are other options to consider, such as buying extra internal or external hard drives to get more storage space and speed things up. But if speed is your main priority, an SSD will definitely be the way to go, if you’re happy to pay for it.

Space

• Prices are largely determined by the amount of storage space on a hard drive and these can vary considerably, this is even more the case with SSDs.  Additional space is not necessarily better when it comes to SSDs, which is the case with hard drives, it pays to do some thinking about what you actually need the SSD to be able to store.  Your operating system and the associated applications that are mission-critical will certainly need to be stored and if you’re a keen player of games such as third-person shooters you should reflect on which of these are your favourites and how much space they will need.

• Use programs like SpaceSniffer to check how much space these things take up on your PC, this will give you some guidance about the size of SSD you’ll need.  Avoid buying an SSD that has a lot more space than you’ll ever require, your lesser used programmes can be stored on a regular spinning hard drive.