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Is your PC too slow? Back in the days, you'd go for a coffee while the PC was booting up but this is 2015! With most computers, it's no longer the processor that's the performance bottleneck but the hard disk. Since conventional hard disks have their limits SSDs may prove a worthy alternative. Read on to learn about their strengths and weaknesses.
HDD vs. SSD
Think of conventional hard disks (HDD) as phonographs. A movable lever reads data from a spinning disc and transfers the information to your computer. If you ever tried to jump from song 1 to song 4 you know it takes a while. Solid State Drives are more like flash drives just bigger and faster. Everything is stored on microchips with no movable parts, no noise and better transportability.
Speed demons
Sounds good, right? But speed is where SSDs really start to shine. Access times are minimal. Our tests showed a greater than 500% difference in speed with 100 MB/s for conventional hard disks and 550MB/s for the SSD. Depending on the connection type and manufacturer, these results may vary but one thing is certain - you definitely notice a difference! Whether you're just booting up (10 seconds with my Windows 10 system), have updates fly by or see applications launch blazingly fast. It feels like a new computer.
A question of durability
Unlike hard disks (that also don't last forever), SSDs have a calculable lifespan. Each chip can only perform a finite number of write operations before it will fail and the first models broke down fairly early but for different reasons, i.e. construction flaws and faulty firmware. Recent endurance tests have shown that SSDs will most likely last for about 13 years. I'd still make a few backups every once in a while just to be safe.
Where it hurts
If you do the math, a terabyte of storage will set you back €50 for a conventional hard disk but €350 for a SSD, recent price drops included! That's why some users take a hybrid approach by installing the operating system and applications on a SSD while keeping bigger files such as photos, music and movies on conventional hard disk drives. The thing is, once you get used to the speed of SSDs it's hard to live with the slowness of conventional drives!
Author's note: The article is done but my boss is threatening to hold his breath until I name at least one Ashampoo product. Very well. Ashampoo HDD Control 3 helps you find the ideal settings for your SSD drives. By default, Windows keeps a few services running that make little or no sense with and may reduce the performance of SSDs. "Good enough, boss?" "Grmbl!"
Froggy1v,
See answer below (migrating from HDD to SSD)
Sven,
My PCs are old.
Aren't there complications with trying to use a SSD drive ?
(EG Drivers needed, BIOS may not like it, etc)
FREE SEAGATE DISKWIZARD IN THE DOWNLOABLE MANUAL
5.5 Migrating your system from an HDD to an SSD
In this section
Preparing for migration ........................................................................ 70
Migrating to SSD using the backup and recovery method ..................... 74
5.5.1 Preparing for migration
Solid state disks have become quite common. Many users decide to replace their system hard disk
with an SSD to enhance the disk system performance. Such a replacement may raise a number of
questions.
First of all, make sure that Seagate DiscWizard detects your new SSD both in Windows and under the
Seagate rescue media. If there is a problem, see What to do if Seagate DiscWizard does not recognize
your SSD (p. 71).
SSDs are great but if you only have one drive in your system ensure that various settings are turned off to ensure the full life, the Ashampoo HDD Control 3 is a great app to help with this. I search for other tools that would easily do this for me and was unable to find anything close. Another application that I highly recommend is Hard Disk Sentinel which will accurately project the remaining life of a drive. Example on my SSD (Corsair Force 3 SSD) it has been running 1174 days and has a projected remaining life of 365 and the drive health is at 75%. Thus I need to be worried about the drive.
With Ashampoo HDD Control 3 I ran the benchmark test for my SSD and found it scored 239 MB/s and looking at others on the http://benchmarks.ashampoo.com/ page I see the top position with a score of 6069 MB/s. How in the heck was this achieved? The top 10 range from 1500 to the 6069. I'd be super happy with any of these scores.
That is exactly what I did. I installed windows 10 on a 128 Gig SSD, and I have a conventional 1TB hard drive for everything else. My boot up time is blazing fast. Works great.
My understanding is if you can only afford a single or small SSD you can get the most out of it by installing the operating system on the SSD. The issue is getting the operating system on the SSD on a system that has it on the HDD
Does Ashampoo have a utility that will do that?
We don’t have an application for that yet. You might want to try Acronis True Image.
I use ssd for programs and working in and hhd for storage and works fine.
i kind of miss the sound of the old hdd drives,
Solid Sate Drives are definitely a thing of the future but todays prices will keep the HDD drives in the market for some time to come.
Interesting article. Guess I need to see which HD I have, eh? An
SSD sounds really, nice, so am hoping that is what I have. Have noticed that this Lenovo with win10, runs a lot faster than my Toshiba with Vista, did, before it crashed and burned. ;(
It burned? Whoa, what a pity.
I don't have an SSD yet but I can sure make an analogy. Using HDD is like putting bicycle tires on a Lexus. While I wait for my HDD to do its thing, I can get in a few of minutes of classical guitar practice. Even then, I have a white flag of surrender beside me.
Keep on practicing guitar! Much better than a computer. :)
I installed an SSD drive as my C drive when I built my computer late last year and immediately noticed an incredible increase in speed over what I'd been getting using a conventional drive.
When I upgraded to Win 10 a few months back it was even faster, and like you have a boot up time of 10 - 15 seconds, which includes checking three other internal drives and three external drives.
The external drives in particular were making my startups go for ten minutes or more, very frustrating to say the least.
I'd definitely recommend having as SSD drive for your operating system and any other programs you use a lot, and having the other programs on a conventional drive.
Godel's knowledgeable comment give us another couple of things to think about before jumping on the SSD -- As I mention in my "real world" experience, having a Laptop with 120 GB SSD that does not seem to break any speed records and is not, in my observation, noticeably quicker than the 500 GB disk I have in a similar laptop. With all of the cautions Godel gives maybe we should stick with the spinning platter for now and use flash drives plug an play and wait for the SSD to prove out. I just purchased the Ashampoo HDD control 3D Software when I found out it is not just for SSD but HDD platters too.
Belle voiture, aa je suis à la retraite et je ne peut pas se permettre de l'acheter. Il serait utile pour mon ordinateur portable, seulement momażyć me reste. Cordialement Andrew
Je aime ce disque, mais je ne peux tout simplement pas se le permettre. Mes retraite et wydatkina médicaments ne me donnent pas l'achat możliwości. Pozdrawiam Andrzej
@DanBaxley I am amazed what you are saying, Dan. I have a 4 year old HP laptop. After 12 months of buying it from new I replaced the HDD with an SSD and the speed difference is absolutely phenomenal. To say you can't see a difference means you have a faulty SSD or maybe you think you have an SSD and don't. There is simply no way you cannot tell the difference.
Since when did Windows start in 8-10 seconds and then is instantly ready to use? You cannot tell me a HDD was instantly ready to use in Windows the moment the Desktop appeared. It whirred away and you had to let Windows finish loading before attempting to open anything, unless you wanted to wait 30-60secs for MS Word to open. I can now fire up Windows, hit the desktop and immediately just click on Word, Excel and Access and bang, bang, bang all three are open in less that a second each.
Definitely have that laptop looked at. It is like getting out of a mini into a Ferrari and saying you cannot see a difference. It just cannot happen.
13 years for a life sounds really good. I "might" have had some HDD's last that long, but the ones I remember are those that fail just AFTER a 3 year warranty has ended.
Very enlightening
Love Ashampoo software --
I purchased and HP with 120 GB SSD - new fancy model with detachable screen. But honestly, I do not see any appreciable speed gain. The shut down and start up seem close to my HP Beats with standard HD.
I added and external USB 3.0 1 TB external and it works really good. But I see no difference in the speed or quickness of loading and uploading. The SDD may be faster but I don't see it, maybe the numbers are faster but it maybe the numbers are so close it doesn't matter.
The SSD is said to have a life expectancy of 13 years? How long is the HDD life expectancy? Also, what about those higher speed HDD drives?
The lifespan of HDDs is not as calculable as that of SSDs since HDDs often fail due to mechanical wear and tear. Some friends of mine are still using drives that are older than 15 years and still spinning. :)
@ Stephen Round Barring actual hardware failure, write endurance is not a factor for most people's uses of SSDs. Just be sure never to Defrag an SSD drive.
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
Remember to power up your SSD occasionally; they not intended for unpowered archival storage and the data will fade after a couple of years if just left in the cupboard.
For most general users of SSDs I would choose an MLC based drive (2 bits stored per cell) over the recent trend to TLC drives (3 bits per cell). The manufacturers are doing it to make the drives cheaper with higher capacities and they'll probably all go that way eventually, but the MLCs are usually faster and more reliable at the moment, in my opinion.
Note to Ashampoo: please consider adding a time to each comment with the date so that we can see which order the comments have been posted in.
Great idea! I’ll forward it to our web developers asap.
Good explanation! Thanks!
Might be worth waiting for Intel's Optane memory which is supposed to be ready for prime time by late 2016. And then, of course, there is IBM's Race Track Memory which was supposed be commercial by 2013 and is still under development.
I love to write about proven and affordable tech gadgets. After all, Christmas is just around the corner. :)
I have been using a 256gB SSD for a couple of years for my 'system-drive' only. All programmes recently installed have been to a conventional Hard Drive of considerably greater capacity. It works well, with one proviso; that is, the operator has to be very careful of software which does periodic backups to a location, which by default, is usually Drive C in my case. Also a few programmes, fortunately not many these days, do not give you that option and install only to Drive C: Many of those and other unwanted items of software are parked in your 'appdata' directory by default. Win-Optimiser and its 'Data-Hog' module is a great way to locate them, and then, optionally, they may be removed manually
That’s good advice! I really appreciate finding valuable additional infos in the comments so frequently.
WOW!!
This Is Grate
I gather that when a Solid State Hard Drive goes off line due to realising the number of write operations that compromise it's reliability the info the S.S.D contains is somehow still readable and obtainable.
The process whereby this sometimes vital information could be transferred to a new Solid State Drive is not yet clear to me. Perhaps Ashampoo could come up with a software solution for us whilewe still have new Solid State Drives this problem is not yet widespread but time will tell. Then again who is looking beyond five years in the future who knows what might pop up in the meantime.
In this .....meantime the use of a currently conventional hard disk drive for backing up appears to be one we would be advised not to continue and we should backup our precious information on solid state memory sticks and cards which will be more reliable because our info is protected by default.
Perhaps hard drive manufacturers should bundle multiple hard disk drives together in such formats to make them conductive to keeping backup information available even when one hard drive goes down Some companies and individuals have been using this multiple combined hard disk drive setup for some time.
I’d truly appreciate it if SSD manufacturers would focus more on these safer solutions.
I have partitioned my harddrive into four partitions, using the primary as my C: drive and the other partitions for the usual files. Due to frequent defraging of the C drive, I suspect that because the files are moved around frequently between partitions, there is a greater need to defrag, This in turn messes with my online, causing a gradual increase of buffering, which is indicated by the increase in cpu usage as well as memory usage. Would this problem occur using a SSD component, or am I figuratively barking up the wrong tree?.
The one (real) advantage I see that conventional HDD's have over SSD HDD's, is the fact that even if their electronics fail, data (probably) is still a stored on a conventional HDD's disk/platter. (Which makes it's ultimately recoverable). Can the same be said of an SSD drive if it's electronics fail..??? Maybe someone with more knowledge of SSD's can answer that question, but I'm thinking if an SSD electronics fail, one's data is likely lost with such a failure. (And yes...EVERYONE should always make good backup's of their data if it is really, REALLY important to you..!!! Perhaps even back it up TWICE if you can't live without it..!!!) The idea of using an SSD for operating system and/or program file execution is a a good one that takes advantage of an SSD's greatest asset - speed. However, storage byte-for-storage byte costs, SSD's - as of right now - are a very expensive when compared to that of conventional HHD's. I've seen conventional 1 Terabyte drives for less than $100..!!! SSD's can't - as of yet - even come close to that price. But yes, if you store a lot of large data files, a dual drive system could be quite optimal as the best trade off between speed and cost-per-storage-byte.