Install a Solid State Hard Drive

You can install a Solid State drive (SSD) in your computer to speed up read and write times. Since there are no platters, actuators or heads, the drive can quickly access data without having to mechanically move across the surface of the disks. But has the time come for consumers to make the leap from a traditional spinning hard drive to a Solid State Drive? Prices have fallen dramatically over the past year, but the SSD drives are still very expensive for the amount of storage s pace you get. These drives are first starting to appear in laptops, where battery power and heat are issues. As the drives increase in capacity and continue to drop on price, you will begin seeing them in desktop machines.

Transitioning From a Standard Hard Drive To a SSD

Logically, you can install the smaller and more expensive Solid State Drive as your primary boot drive and have a larger spinning drive for archival storage of data. You would then change the target location of your My Documents folder to the archival drive and use the small SSD to boot and run programs. If read /write times and  boot speed is important to you then you should consider making the move to a SSD drive.

The process involves cloning the current drive and installing the new Solid State Drive into your PC. If you’re adding it to a laptop, you probably will not need to do anything special. If you are installing the drive into a PC, you might be required to install a bracket to accommodate it depending on your case. If you’re moving from an older IDE drive to a SSD, you will need an IDE to SATA adapter, just as you would with any SATA drive. The entire upgrade should not take very long.

There is a very good instructional video on how to install a SSD here.