by David Glick

Have you heard? These devices have been around for quite some time and lately their prices have become MUCH more competitive to standard hard drives! That’s right – we are talking about SSD (Solid State Drive) hard drives! Currently, you can get a 500 Gigabyte (GB) SSD for just over $200, and a 250 GB for $100 or less! Prices are sure to come down as they become more mainstream too, pretty much meaning the ultimate demise for all but the largest standard mechanical hard drive. (Yes that is our prediction :-))

There is plenty of good news in using an SSD drive over a standard mechanical drive, the best of which is the speed of the device. Have you seen an operating system boot up with an SSD, or call a program up? The typical boot in Windows occurs in less than 15 seconds after the BIOS screen goes away, and when you click a program it just does it – right there, right then. Also, the Samsung EVO 850 drives come with 5 year warranties – about the best in the business, and if you are going to consider an SSD drive, this is the brand that I would recommend.

But there must be a downside, you say? Yes – there is one and it could be a big one if you do not back up your data (Please say you do!!??) – there are NO second chances with these devices. When they go bad, they are GONE GONE GONE. The data is POOF – GONE! No reclaiming, and no clean room facility can get it back. With a mechanical hard drive, the data is still on the drive most times the drive fails, so for the ‘bookoo’ bucks it can take for the clean room facility to recover your data, you at least have a chance to get it back. Not with an SSD – that data is so scrambled you can’t even make an egg with it! We have also heard that the SSD devices may not be compatible with some older Macs.

So – as long as you back up your data on a regular basis, and to multiple sources and/or devices, we do recommend SSD drives for their speed, and their newly lowered price points. Last question – is it worth upgrading an older computer to one of these drives? Given the fact that highest number of failures we see in computers is the hard drive (possibly after the power supply) and if your computer is 3 years old or less AND it wasn’t the cheapest entry level device you could find, we say GO FOR IT! You won’t believe the difference it makes in the speed of the machine (as long as you have plenty of physical memory installed for the tasks you use for the computer).

If you need help upgrading, we can definitely help you. Just give us a call at 602-515-1733 or 928-649-3032. I hope you have found this to be helpful!! Thanks for reading!

Dave

PS: Be sure to turn off the disk defragmenter schedule in Windows if you get one of these drives – defragmenting them actually cause premature failure of the device!