The hottest thing in high-end Computers these days is the Solid State Drive.
Why?
Because it solves the problem of the major data transfer bottleneck. Let me explain…
- The speed of the computer is determined by many things -
- Primarily the power of the CPU,
- The power of the GPU
- The efficiency of the motherboard chipset.
- RAM (or the lack thereof). RAM doesn’t have that much effect until you don’t have enough of it! Then, the machine has to dump some of it’s working data in order to make space for more calculations. That data is written to a much slower device – the hard drive. This can slow matters up tremendously.
What if you could make a much faster “hard drive” out of electronic memory chips instead of a relatively slow mechanical hard drive? That’s what a SSD (Solid State Drive) does. It is much faster than a hard drive and uses a particular technology which retains the information written on it even when the power is turned off.
So why do we still have mechanical hard drives?
One simple ominous word: PRICE.
SSD’s are expensive!
- A 64GB SDD costs between R1100 and R1600 + VAT sepending on it’s specifications and speed rating.
- A 128GB SDD costs between R2000 and R3000 + VAT sepending on it’s specifications and speed rating.
- A 256GB SDD costs between R4000 and R6000 + VAT sepending on it’s specifications and speed rating.
- A 512GB SDD costs … Astronomical – You don’t want to know !
A byte of storage on an SSD is about 20x more expensive than on a Hard drive. However, the appreciable speed gain is enormous. Windows loads faster, Programs load faster and everything just works better because you don’t get so impatient waiting for the machine.
So how do we employ them?
We use a mixture of both SSDs and Hard drives. We set up the computer so that the operating system (Windows or Linux or whatever) is located on the SSD together with our “heavy-duty” programs, while our “light-duty” programs (Those that don’t need much computing power) and our Data is stored on the mechanical hard drive.
It takes a while to set this up optimally and it all depends on the Heavy duty programs like AutoCAD, Photoshop, 3D-Studio Max or even powerful modern games.
The size of the SSD depends on all of this and also whether you are using a 32-bit operating system or a 64-bit one. If you are still using a 32-bit operating system, Windows can only use about 3GB of any available RAM. Any more is wasted. If you are using a memory hungry application, you will want to have a large enough SSD to accomodate some of the current data files that you are working on as well as the swap disk!
It gets a bit complicated, but that’s why I’m here – to advise you and even set your machine up for you properly.
