Seras provides information technology solutions and services to businesses and consumers throughout the greater Columbia SC area - including Lexington, West Columbia, Irmo, Blythewood, and even out to Camden, Sumter, Orangeburg, and Newberry. We receive many requests from customers to diagnose slow start up times on computers or slow performance in general. We check for viruses, sufficient memory, and then the hard drive - age, space, and size.
SSD - The way of the Future
While many problems are solved through adequate cleanup, virus protection, or memory upgrades; one of the best values is in hard drive upgrades. Most have heard of the old business equation:
Quality (Benefits) / Price = Overall Value
If the price goes up, the value goes down. If the quality or benefit goes up, then a better value is created. When it comes to upgrading your hard drive to a solid state drive (SSD), it becomes apparent that this is one of the most valuable upgrades to your PC. Take a look at the following:
- Traditional hard drives use a spinning disk similar to a record player, which can break down or get very hot
- Excessive heat shortens the lifespan and performance of a computer
- The reduction in overall moving parts reduces the amount of energy used by your PC
- Instead of moving parts, SSDs use "flash memory" similar to RAM, but unlike RAM, SSD memory remains even when the unit loses power
- Simple functions have dramatic increases in speed such as getting reboot times down to 20 seconds versus 3-5 minutes, browsing the web, and launching programs
Testing
Everyone wants things faster and more reliable, but how do you prove the change in speeds. Check out this test performed by www.howtogeek.com with the SSD on the top and a Traditional Hard Drive on the bottom:
Prices for SSDs have dropped considerably over the last year or so with options in the $50.00 range! This rounds out our equation - showing that prices have gone down and quality is going up.
Replacement
Adding or replacing the hard drive is easy as most desktop computers have more than one hard drive tray. Simply power down the machine, insert the SSD into a secondary drive bay and use the old hard drive as a backup for storage. In other cases, you may need to clone the data from your old drive to your new SSD. Laptops are more complicated. Some of these steps may be a bit complicated for newbies and Seras is glad to help. Contact us here if you would like more information!
