As you may already know, everything you do and create on your computer is stored and loaded up from your hard drive. What you may not know however is that Hard Disc Drives were created in 1954 .
Since then the only major changes that have happened to hard disc drives, is that their storage space has increased while their size has decreased.
In 1956 a hard disc drive was about the size of two refrigerators and only stored roughly 3.6MB which is about the size of one mp3.
Now you can get a hard disc drive about the size of your hand which can store 4TB or 1.2Million mp3’s.
So why is any of that important? Well, the hard disc drive is the slowest component nearly all home computers.
If you have windows Vista, 7 or 8 then you can go to system, in the control panel and view your system rating. This will most likely be 5.9 as the highest a standard hard disc drive can be rated in windows is 5.9.
A computer is only as fast as its slowest component and as such upgrading the hard drive will bring the system in sync with the rest of its components.
You might however be wondering, what’s the point of upgrading if it’s not going to be any faster?
Until 2006 the military was primarily using a new type of hard drive called solid state drives.
Solid state drives are different to normal hard disc drives as they have no moving parts and all the data is stored inside flash storage chips, similar to the type of storage inside USB thumb drives.
However they have some massive advantages over a standard drive such as increased speed and access time. By 2006 this technology reached consumers and has since gone mainstream.
Now, installing Solid Stated Drives (SSD’s) into your system is one of the biggest impact changes you can do to your computer. Currently SSD’s have speeds of around 500MB/s compared to around 100MB/s.
This makes SSD’s around 5 times faster than a normal hard disc drive. However this is not as significant as the decreased access time. Access time is the time it takes for the drive to find files on the system, the faster the drive can find files the faster they will load up.
On a standard drive this will be around 9ms; this may sound fast, but in practice as you may have noticed this is still slow. On an SSD access times are around 0.1ms; this is a decrease of over 9000%.
The decrease in access time leads files, programs and booting up windows to happen in an instant. Loading up Microsoft word takes less than 1 second and loading up windows when booting up the computer is only 8 seconds, this is significantly faster than the 30+ seconds it normally takes.
Even when logging in there’s no longer a need to wait for the desktop to refresh as everything happens instantly.
This is why I thoroughly recommend buying an SSD for your computer or laptop as it can significantly increase performance and make your computer feel like its new.
