SSD Is The New RAM

SSD Is The New RAM

Solid State Drives are sweeping the globe and will eventually render traditional hard disks obsolete.

Since the 90’s the advice you automatically received (or dished out) when asking about speeding up your computer was ” just upgrade your RAM.”

This was touted so much so that even my grandparents knew we weren’t discussing horned, uncastrated, male sheep.

Nowadays however, most people’s RAM is well into the GB’s and hard disks have simply lagged behind in terms of significant performance improvements – until now that is.

In many cases people even have too much memory installed now.  Operating systems simply aren’t utilizing it all and in some cases it’s even slowing down computers as the OS tries to manage it all.

Enter SSD (or Solid State Drives) drives, the ultra small, ultra light, ultra quick storage devices about to sweep the market and destined to make traditional hard disks obsolete.  These are essential memory but advances in technology has brought us robustness, non-volatile (it keeps your data without power) storage with massive speed improvements over hard disks.

The key here for most people is ‘quick’.  With speeds easily exceeding 10x faster (yes, TEN TIMES FASTER) than your regular hard disk you can imagine what this thing is going to do to even an oldish PC or Mac.

Well, in fact, I can tell you – it will breathe new life into it.

I recently upgraded my own 4 year old MacBook which was about to head for the trash due to its increasingly sluggish performance and now it flies.  I would even go so far as to say it is faster now then when it was new and I’ve saved a fortune as I don’t need to buy a new Mac now.

Previously SSD was used exclusively in ultra portable devices such as tablets, iPods and netbooks because of it’s small size and light weight but wow was it expensive if you wanted to get your hands on one for your PC or Mac.

Only a year ago it was priced at about $3 per GB  but now due to mass manufacturing and every hard disk and memory manufacturer (these things are made of memory) getting into the game means prices are plummeting and set to continue that way.  For example the 120GB drive I bought recently was just around $1 per GB.

Itching to know how it works?

Well of course it depends entirely on your current PC or Mac but safe to say if it has an SATA controller then you’re looking at a relatively painless upgrade.

Check out the articles coming over the next few days and weeks on buying an SSD disk, the relatively painless steps to installing and migrating your existing data and operating system and how to utilise your old slow hard disk for other purposes such as backup.