Slow computer? A new hard drive may be all you need.

Have you ever noticed how fast your mobile phone is to wake up? You just press a button, swipe, and bam, it’s ready to go! Yet your PC might take a while to think about it… Why is this?

Well, your mobile uses what’s called a Solid State Drive (SSD), rather than the traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD) with a physical spinning disk and needle.  HDD’s contain several moving parts, and the needle takes time to navigate the spinning disk and read the data, which can be anything from documents, to video and photos.  Because of this, HDD’s can only really ever be so fast and are also subject to greater risk of data loss due to unexpected bumps.  A scratched disk could mean saying goodbye to your data, unless you had the foresight to back it up.

SSD’s are one of the best performance increasing pieces of hardware you can add to your new computer. In fact, once you’ve used a computer or laptop with a SSD, it’s really hard to go back to the slower spinning disk drives that we’ve gotten used to over the years.

The issue is that the more storage space you require, the more solid states costs. We are all used to having at least 1 TB of disk space so a solid state with 128GB seems paltry.  That said, a good option is to store your operating system and software on a smaller SSD, and other files such as movies and photos on a 1TB spinning hard disk drive.

At the time of writing this article, a Macbook Pro-compatible 128GB SSD by hardware manufacturer Samsung costs about $189 or approximately $1.50 per gigabyte, with PC SSD’s costing about the same (but with more variety in terms of manufacturers and sizes.)

In short you probably don’t need a more powerful PC unless you are playing video games or high end graphics work. You may just need a faster hard drive.

Are sluggish computers or a slow network affecting your business? Get in touch with us for a no obligation chat about how we can help your business.