SSD, Upgrade to an ~~~ Right Now

It’s not just theoretical benchmarks that improve. Your computer becomes much, much faster to boot. How much of an improvement depends on your operating system, hardware, and what software is loading at boot — but you can make it down to 10-20 seconds, even on an older Windows 7 system. Your desktop will load much more quickly after you log in too. Even if you have a lot of nasty bloatware running at boot, your desktop will become usable much more quickly.

Launching a program, opening a file, and saving something to disk will all happen much, much faster. Click a program, and it can load almost instantly. All those little moments of waiting you don’t notice when you use your computer are adding up. Even just browsing the web will be faster — with your browser’s cache files stored on an SSD, they’ll load almost instantly instead of more slowly from a mechanical drive.

Large SSDs Are Now Inexpensive

SSDs used to be very expensive, especially for the small amount of storage space they had. In 2008, an 80 GB Intel SSD would cost you $595. That’s a whopping $7.43 per GB.

You can now get a sizable Crucial MX100 256 GB SSD for about $112. That’s only $0.43 per GB. Need less space? 128 GB will only cost you $74 — about $0.58 per GB. If you need more, you can get 512 GB for $212 — more expensive, but still a pretty good deal at $0.41 per GB. These aren’t even low-quality drives — Anandtech gave them a glowing review. Wait for a sale on these drives and you might end up spending even less! You don’t have to get this specific drive, but it’s a great example of where prices are headed.

This can seem awfully expensive when you can get a 2 TB mechanical hard drive for $113 or so. That’s only about $0.06 per GB! But how much space do you really need? For nearly every computer user, speed is more important than raw capacity. You’ll feel speed all the time, but most people won’t need to store 2 TB of data on their drives. If you do need the space, that’s a great reason to get both — an SSD for your system files and programs, and a mechanical drive for long-term storage of media files and other stuff you don’t need the speed for.

Installing an SSD is Easy

Installing an SSD is pretty simple — it’s basically the same as installing a hard disk. Assuming you’re using a desktop PC, you can easily power down your computer, open its case, and insert the SSD drive into a drive bay. You should have more than one drive bay, so you can install the SSD alongside your mechanical drive and keep using the old mechanical drive for additional storage space.

Upgrading a laptop may be a bit more complicated, but it’s often still not too difficult. Assuming you an open up your laptop, you can swap an SSD for the included drive. You can also get optical-drive-bay-to-SSD kits that will allow you to swap out your DVD or CD drive for an SSD.

Once your SSD is installed, you can easily reinstall Windows on your computer and restore your important files from a backup for a nice, clean, fresh, speedy system. That’s what we recommend.

If you really want to keep your old Windows install, you can. Many solid-state drives come with free drive-cloning software that will help you migrate the contents of your old drive straight to your SSD. Manufacturers want to make it as easy to upgrade as possible. If you need to do this on your own and the drive doesn’t come with any imaging software, we have a guide that will help you migrate your existing Windows install to an SSD.