Solid State Drives
 | Author:
Victor Sample
Vic Sample: MT43 News Treasurer |
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about Solid State Drives (SSD) and Hard Disk Drives (HDD). Everyone should be familiar with Hard Disk Drives. They have been the standard disk drive in PCs for decades. SSDs are relatively new and are very expensive. A standard hard drive with 1 terabyte (100GB) of storage adds very little cost to a PC. SSDs are only available at 256GB and 512GB – and getting a PC with 512GB instead of 256GB increases the price of a PC dramatically.
Why get a PC with an SSD drive instead of a regular Hard Drive? SSD drives are faster and theoretically will last longer since they don’t have moving parts. This week I was installing Windows updates to a PC at the MT 43 News office. Windows updates are very large and can take a long time to download and install. I have been doing Windows 10 updates for many years on a lot of different PCs and have watched the performance of the PC while the updates are being applied.
My laptop has a standard HDD drive. When the updates are being applied the usage of the HDD goes to 100% and the Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage drops to around 3-5%. That means that the PC is basically spending a lot of time waiting for reads and writes to my hard drive to complete. Most of the 30-45 minutes it takes to download and install the update is spent waiting for my hard drive to do its work.
The computer at MT 43 News uses a small (256GB) Solid State Drive (SSD). As usual, I monitored the performance of the PC while the Windows update was running – and the results were stunning.
The usage on the SSD ran about 30% (instead of 100% on my standard hard drive) and the CPU usage ran 30-35% (instead of 3-5%). Instead of taking 35-40 minutes to do the Windows update, it took about 5 minutes!
The slowest activity on any computer is reading/writing from a storage device. The CPU is extremely fast so computers tend to spend a lot of time waiting for reading/writing to complete. In fact, that lag time is how a computer can run more than one program at a time; when the CPU has to wait for a read/write operation to complete it has time to run other programs. The reason it only took 5 minutes to update Windows on the PC with a Solid State Drive is that the read/write operations are much, much faster so the CPU spends less time waiting and more time working.
So, the next time you need to buy a new PC really consider getting one with a Solid State Drive (SSD). It will probably give you less storage capacity, but if you don’t need a full terabyte (1000GB) you might consider the smaller SSD drive – your computer should perform much better!
