Nowadays, SSDs are becoming more popular. The reason behind this is the new applications are becoming more resource intensive and computers are getting slow with traditional hard disks. This mostly happens to the machines with Windows operating systems. Therefore most people are upgrading their machines with SSDs to achieve a higher performance. But the price of a SSD is relatively higher (more than 2 times) than a HDD. So most people face to the problem whether the extra performance we get is worth compared to the price of SSD with HDD. Some people say that SSDs are useless as they have a limited write cycle count. What is the truth behind think this? Should you upgrade your machine with a SSD?
Yes. You should upgrade your machine with a SSD if you are someone who worries about the performance.
But Why?
How does it useful for me?
1. Amazing boot up speed
Most of the PC users worry about the longer boot up time. Even though the system had a enough boot up speed with a fresh copy of the OS, boot up time gets increased day by day with the use. Though your windows machine boots in less than 15 seconds it will take another 5 - 10 minutes to become stable and use smoothly. Hard disk freezes with the higher load of start up applications and services. The case will be worst with a restart. But with a SSD you can restart your machine in less than 10 seconds and start working smoothly as soon as the machine boots up. You won't feel a lag of start up applications or services.
My laptop took more than 10 minutes to become stable with the HDD. But after adding SSD I can restart and launch Adobe Photoshop in less than 30 seconds of time.
2. Extremely fast application launch speed
You know by experience big applications like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, IntelliJ IDEA, Net Beans or even MS Word 2016 takes much time to launch with HDD. But any of this application can be launched in less 20 seconds with a SSD.
3. Less indexing time and build time for programmers
If you are a programmer and you are using IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA you know that it takes a longer time to index a new project. If you notice while running a indexing process most probably your hard disk has been loaded nearly 100%. HDD has become the bottle neck of the process, not the CPU. Same thing happens when you build or run your project.
These process become more than 10 times faster with a SSD. You can notice that with a SSD the bottle neck of the indexing process is CPU not the SSD. Therefore, you must have a SSD if you are a programmer.
Not only in programming tools, any other tool which performs disk intensive tasks can be boosted with a SSD.
4. Unbelievable copy speed
Suppose you are in a hurry but you want to copy a file of several gigabytes from a flash drive. You can do this in seconds with a SSD and and USB 3.0 port. Copy speed will be 75 - 100 MB/s depending on the performance of your pen drive. (Assuming the file is a single large file. Not too many small files)
Suppose you are in a hurry but you want to copy a file of several gigabytes from a flash drive. You can do this in seconds with a SSD and and USB 3.0 port. Copy speed will be 75 - 100 MB/s depending on the performance of your pen drive. (Assuming the file is a single large file. Not too many small files)
5. Overall performance gain of the PC
Other than aforementioned areas, the overall performance of your machine will be increased dramatically. You may have noticed that sometimes your PC get frozen with no reason. I almost all such cases you will notice that in task manager in Windows or resource monitor in Linux the hard disk has been loaded to nearly 100%. This because random file access by the OS. Fragmentation can also be a reason for this. You can easily get rid from all of the above issues just by having a SSD. SSDs never get fragmented.
Other than aforementioned areas, the overall performance of your machine will be increased dramatically. You may have noticed that sometimes your PC get frozen with no reason. I almost all such cases you will notice that in task manager in Windows or resource monitor in Linux the hard disk has been loaded to nearly 100%. This because random file access by the OS. Fragmentation can also be a reason for this. You can easily get rid from all of the above issues just by having a SSD. SSDs never get fragmented.
Do SSDs have a limited number of right cycles?
Yes of course. The meaning of the SSD is Solid State Drive. When data is written to a SSD this solid structure get changed. Number of times the solid structure can be changed is limited. That's why we say SSDs have a limited number of write cycles. Because of this many people say that adding a SSD is not worth and SSDs are not durable. Is this true? Actually aren't SSDs durable?
The fact about the limited number of write cycles is true. But most of the people don't about the value of this write cycle count. If you check specifications of a SSD there is a value called Total Bytes Written (TBW). For 240 GB Kingston SSD this is around 640 TB. Click for more information. That means you can refill the complete SSD 640/240 * 1000 = 2666 times. In other words, if you write 100 GB per day, you can use your SSD for more than 17 years. Is anyone going to use even a laptop for about 17 years. No right. Then we can see that this write cycle limit is not a problem. If you consider about a HHD, it's true that HDDs don't have such a limit. But the motor or the arm of the hard disk will fail before writing half of the amount of the above value. Therefore SSDs are durable than HHDs in time duration as well as in write cycles practically.
Conclusion
Therefore don't think twice to upgrade your machine with a SSD. The performance gain you receive is much worth than the money you pay.
Comments
Post a Comment