Generally we keep upgrading our computers to the latest processors but at the most you might just see around 20-25% overall performance boost even with the latest processor compared to your 2-3 year old processor because the main bottleneck in our modern computers is the slow IO operations due to the physical nature of the disk that we use particular the Hard Disk (HDD), the HDD are very slow compared to the memory and the processors and thus everything slows down due to the same 90% of the times the CPU would be just waiting for the data to arrive from the HDD so upgrading to a faster HDD technology makes a lot of sense and hence SSD (Solid state drives) come into the picture.
Think of SSD as huge blocks of Memory Chips that store your data the data does not get wiped even when power is not there, comparing it to traditional HDD as there is no moving head that is required to physically move from one location to another to access the data, the seek times are very fast on a SSD upto 50 times faster than HDD.
But sustained SSD read and write speeds are not that fast but still they are around 2.5 – 4 times faster than HDD so loading of lot of flies like booting a computer or launching of applications all happen a lot faster typically 2x – 3x time less compared to standard HDD now compare the performance boost that you get by just having a powerful processor the application might just launch 30% faster but now with the help of SDD you are getting a boost of around 200 – 300% which needless to say is pretty impressive.
For example a normal 3.5 inch HDD with a 7,200 rpm which is found in most desktop computer can get in real world around 55-65 MB/sec of transfer speed using SATA interface but even cheap SSD have a transfer speed of around 200 – 250 MB/sec and the newer faster SATA 3 ones can go around 450 Mbps (OCZ Vertex 3) which is needless to say very fast when compared to traditional HDD.
The other thing is that SSD are virtually silent as there are no moving parts in them and that in turn reduces the heat produced by them also in terms of power consumption they beat the traditional HDD most SSD consume just around 2 watts of power when active and even less in standby mode.
There is always a flip side to the latest technology and it’s no different with SSD, the main problem with SSD is the cost they are expensive when you compare them to traditional HDD for example a SATA2 60 GB SSD would cost you around Rs 6,500 whereas you can get more than 2 Terabyte (2000 GB) standard HDD for around Rs 5,000 so in terms of raw storage space a traditional HDD beats SSD hands down.
Thus the ideal way to use a SDD is to just load the Operating system and your frequently used programs on that and use a traditional HDD to store all your data like Music / Documents / Media thus in this way you get best of both the worlds your system will boot and perform a lot faster and genreally most of applications will launch 2-3 times faster compared to a standard HDD and thus even a 60 – 80 GB SSD would be sufficient, in Windows doing this is very simple just make the SSD your primary ‘C’ boot drive and load the operating system on that and you can have a traditional HDD as your secondary drive where you store all your other large data / media files.
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