Is it worth upgrading my refurbished laptop or computer with an SSD drive?
On: 28 June 2018
If you are thinking of buying one of our second hand laptops or computers, you will see on of the options is to change to and SSD drive (Solid State Hard Drive). Typically, users would upgrade their RAM or Memory to get a boost in performance but now SSD drives can turbo charge your machine for a relatively small cost.
Before we get into the pros and cons, lets define what an SSD is.
An SSD does everything a standard mechanical drive does except that the data is stored on interconnected flash memory chips. USB thumb drives use similar storage except an SSD is faster and more reliable.
So, why upgrade to and SSD Drive
Speed – SSD drives are much faster and they do no have to spin up, they will start Windows and open and close applications much quicker than a standard drive. A laptop with an SSD installed can load the operating system in a few seconds, this is the main benefit – load time.
Power Consumption – An SSD drive uses much less power than a mechanical drive so your laptop or desktop will have lower power consumption.
Noise – As an SSD has no movable parts, it will be silent compared to a mechanical drive
There a few drawbacks with SSD drives that you will also need to consider:
Price – The cost of SSD drives are more expensive than their mechanical counterparts. You will need to determine your own cost vs speed trade off for your situation and budget.
Capacity – Mechanical drives typically have higher storage capacities although currently you can get SSD drives in 1TB and 2TB capacities.
An ideal solution?
Considering the main advantage of the SSD is load time, perhaps the best solution is to have an SSD as a primary drive where the operating system and other programs are stored. A mechanical hard drive can be used as a secondary drive give the cost per gigabyte is a lot lower to store movies, pictures, music and other large files.
