I was working at Intel back in the early 80s when Intel invented the flash drive (back then it was an EEPROM; almost the same). Of course then it was small capacity, slow and expensive, but the potential seemed huge. I remember remarking to a fellow engineer that we should shortly be able to replace our hard drives with flash memory. Current capacities weren’t large enough and it was much too expensive in those days, but I didn’t think it would be long before hard drives were obsolete.<\/p>\n
Fast forward 30 years. During this time flash memory has continued to get faster and cheaper, but hard drives have also kept moving ahead getting larger and cheaper, and a little faster.<\/p>\n
Hard drives are still cheaper than “Solid State Drives” (or SSD, as flash-based hard drives are called), but we seem to have reached a tipping point where it might be worth the extra cost for the gain in performance. So today I replaced the hard drive in my main desktop computer with an SSD.<\/p>\n
I am amazed<\/em> at the improvement in performance. It is greater than any other upgrade I have ever done, including upgrading the CPU or adding RAM. Windows 7 used to take over 2 minutes to cold boot, with icons trickling in for a minute or two after that, but it now is totally up and ready in about 20 seconds. Programs launch almost immediately. Even web browsing is much, much faster; apparently I haven’t been limited by my internet connection but rather by hard drive speed. When I compile programs, the hard drive used to thrash around loading libraries and modules for up to a minute; now it is not quite instantaneous, but very, very fast. Programs close much faster (as they write their configuration files to disk) and system shut down is much faster. I will no longer dread doing a Windows Update with the required reboot, since I can be back up and running in less than a minute.<\/p>\n If you are thinking of replacing your computer because it is too slow, you might consider just replacing the hard drive with an SSD for less than the cost of a new computer. It might give you more benefit for your money.<\/p>\n I got one from the Samsung 840 EVO series. They seem to have the best price and competitive performance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was working at Intel back in the early 80s when Intel invented the flash drive (back then it was an EEPROM; almost the same). Of course then it was small capacity, slow and expensive, but the potential seemed huge. I remember remarking to a fellow engineer that we should shortly be able to replace […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1043"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1047,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043\/revisions\/1047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}