Solid State Hard Drives

Don’t you wish that every time you went to switch on your computer it started up as quickly as coming out of sleep mode?

Well with the newest style of Solid State Drives (SSD) that dream is almost a reality.

In almost any computer built today the slowest responding component is the hard drive which is very unfortunate because it is the data backbone of the whole system. What this means is that all the data that is required to display and manipulate what you see on your computer screen is stored on your hard drive.

This essentially means that the huge amount of the lag between when you turn your computer on or click on a program, to the time that it is ready to use, is because of the internal components of the hard drive moving around and performing their duties.

This is where SSD’s take the cake. From the name you probably guessed that the drive is Solid State and what this means is that rather than having all the data written to disks and read off with a physical arm and read-head, the data is stored in little electronic devices called transistors. This effectively means that access to data is almost instant and this results in peak computer performance.

A storage drive’s read speed is measured in terms of a Seek Time which is how long it takes for the drive to get the information once it has been asked for it. In a top of the line Disk based Hard Drive this can be as low as 4.2 ms. A middle of the range SSD however will have an average Seek Time of about 0.1 ms!!

Prices for SSD’s used to be up as high as $700 around 3 years ago. Now for a higher spec drive you are looking to pay around $300 and the prices are constantly dropping.

Here at Just Logical we use SSD’s in our high speed systems and the load times of these computers are really incredible. A full shutdown and then restart usually takes around 15-20 seconds all together before the computer is usable again!!

Click on the image below to check out the systems we build, (look for the ones with SSD’s)

SSD’s can drastically improve the performance of nearly any computer, so if you’re looking to increase your PC’s performance maybe you should look into an SSD.