Replacing a hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD)

There are two main storage options on laptop computers currently - hard drive (HD) and solid state hard drives (SSHD or SSD). For most applications, SSD is going to be a superior technology option for your data storage needs.

Solid State Hard Drives have a lot of great advantages over traditional hard drives. One of the biggest advantages is that Solid State drives, as the name implies, have no moving parts. This makes the SSD more reliable as the moving parts and magnetic platters in a traditional hard drive make them prone to failure as they age. Also, due to having no moving parts, an SSD's access time is greatly reduced. Access time is the time it takes a program to access data from a drive for use by the program. A typical SSD can access data nearly 100 times faster than a traditional HD. Even though this time is measured in micro-seconds, faster access means smoother running programs, especially for memory hog programs like operating systems or graphics programs. One huge benefit that most users realize is a significantly faster boot time - up to 160% faster! In other words, a full boot used to take 80 seconds would now take only 32 seconds. Again, due to the lack of moving parts, and SSD uses less energy making battery life better, creates no noise, and generates less heat.

The current downsides to SSD are the price and capacity. SSD is considerably more expensive than HD and anything over 512GB of storage is going to be beyond most people's price range. This can necessitate the need to purchase attached hard drive storage or more extensive cloud storage usage and the associated storage costs.

For most laptops, replacement of the HD with SSD is fairly simple and most manufactures of SSD drives provide data transfer software and instructions to make the replacement as painless as possible. As most SSD drives will be smaller in size than a traditional HD drive, manufacturers also make available adapters.

In summary, most users would benefit greatly upgrading their current drive to an SSD from a traditional HD.