Moving on to Solid-State Drives

I think the best upgrade you can do for your computer is to replace its conventional disk drive with a Solid-State Drive (SSD). Particularly so on a notebook or or netbook, since conventional disks on them tend to spin slower. I started looking at SSDs last year. The price then was still prohibitively expensive. But at the end of last year, I managed to snag a pretty good deal on an excellent performing consumer grade SSD. It’s the OCZ Vertex 2 (by now superseded by the Vertex 3).

Since then, I’ve been convinced that SSDs are about the best upgrade you can get for a notebook. Conventional disks are slow, particularly so on notebooks (typically spinning at 5400RPM versus 7200RPM on consumer desktops), and it’s a pain waiting for programs or data to load from disk. You can add RAM to a computer so that more things can stay in cache and speed things up a bit, but eventually you’re going to have to read or write something to disk.

With an SSD, everything happens pretty much instantly. Alright, maybe not literally, but it’s really blazingly fast compared with using a conventional disk. I remember, one day, when I accidentally launched Adobe Photoshop by mistake, something that happens from time to time, I was cursing silently thinking about how my notebook was going to lock up for an eternity while it struggled to start the application. But lo and behold… Adobe Photoshop was up ready to use in like just three seconds. That was simply amazing. From that point on, I had no qualms loading “heavy” applications.

Using a device that “responds” instantaneously makes interacting with it so much more enjoyable. This is what everyone expects of their smartphones, their tablets, their networked DVR, etc. So why not computers as well? I am slowly progressing to the type of consumer that expects things to “just work”, and also to “work beautifully”. Yup, waiting for Adobe Photoshop or whichever Microsoft Office app to load is not fun at all.

I know the OCZ Vertex 2 is already superseded by the Vertex 3. But for those of you who are thinking of replacing the spinning disk on your notebook that has only SATA2 interfaces (probably there aren’t SATA3 notebooks at this time), know that the Vertex 2 already sort of saturates the SATA3 bandwidth. That’s at least in terms of the rated specifications (285MB/s reads, 275MB/s writes). If you do some Google digging, you’d learn that the Vertex 2 is spectacular because it’s SandForce 1200 controller has been specially blessed with the performance of the enterprise-grade SandForce 1500 controller.

Nowadays, SSDs are getting more commonplace. Apple’s MacBook Air product line now offers only SSD configurations. Servers are commonly offered SSD options, and in fact, when I recently asked for some quotations, SSDs were automatically included for the operating system drive even though I did not ask for it.

You’re probably not going to get an SSD as big as you’d like… at least not as big as you might have gotten with a spinning hard disk. So the trick is that you’ll have to learn about space management. What to keep on your fast SSD, and what to move out to an external storage. External storage could be thumb drives, portable hard disks, or even a cloud-based storage. Cloud-based storage could be awfully slow… but hey, some people move their photos and music to the cloud. These are the chunking stuffs that would eat up lots of your disk space.

So… if you’re thinking how to soup up your notebook… go for SSDs!