Looking for Your Own Superpower? An SSD Will Make You Fast!

I guess I really am an IT guy through and through. Away from the office I spend hours listening to IT podcasts, watching industry keynote addresses and enjoy keeping up with the latest trends in the industry I've spent most of my adult years working in. 

Over the last few years of supplying our clients with new computers I found myself wondering why they weren't really getting much faster. Each year the tech news people I listened to told me what the manufacturers were coming out with in terms of new CPUs and RAM and as a techie I would gush about how amazing it all was going to be.  In reality the new hardware didn't seem to move the needle on speed and it was a bit of a mystery.

We had been looking at Solid State Drives (SSDs) as a potential solution to the anemic speeds we were seeing but they came with baggage that at the time made them a bit of a gamble for business users.  The three big issues were lack of storage space, a relatively short life span and high cost per gigabyte. Businesses need to get a good return on investment and the SSD just didn't seem ready for prime time.

Fast forward a couple of years; the prices began to drop to a more reasonable level and we decided it was time to do some dogfooding (an expression in our industry meaning to try the technology out for ourselves first).  We installed SSDs in a couple of our older computers that we use everyday and BOOM they were lighting fast!  We quickly became believers. 

What's so cool about modern SSDs is that they solve so many of the problems that have plagued computers for many years.  Here are the key benefits.

• SSDs can run your computer’s operating system way faster (up to 10X) We’re talking under 15 second boot times
• Unlike traditional hard drives SSDs have no moving parts which means no nois
  
  And for laptop users SSDs are an awesome choice because
• Their reduced power consumption makes your battery last longer
• The produce less heat so the laptop fan doesn't have to run as much
• They weigh less than traditional hard drives
• They are less susceptible to damage from drops

So where are we now with Solid State Drives? Well we have found that not only are the new computers we are selling with SSDs running amazingly fast but we've also discovered that SSDs can be the fountain of youth for much older machines too!  We have several clients with a fleet of older PCs that are super slow and almost unusable.  We proposed testing SSDs on a few machines and to our amazement these old machines became a pleasure to work on again. Paired with Windows 10 these computers feel like new and the users are very happy with the result.  And a huge positive side effect is that we are keeping computers in production for longer and reducing the number going to recycling.

So hail to the SSD...it kinda saved the old PC.