We all know that feeling of opening your favourite most used program only to be presented with the dreaded spinning circle advising us to ‘please wait’. Even trying to open just a couple of your most needed applications only for your computer to be brought to its knees doing so. It’s infuriating, especially when there’s no indication of anything actually happening other than said circle mocking you as it whizzes around happily.
The Cause
One of the main culprits for causing these symptoms is the speed of your hard disk; when you are opening programs and files, the disk has to search for and load a lot of information, older drives can only do this at a certain pace so they have to queue tasks which results in a slow down for you.
Whilst it’s possible to improve this by completing things like Disk Defragmentation and other general maintenance, there is only so much that can be done. The way conventional hard disk drive works are that it has magnetic platters and a small arm that hovers over the platters to read and write data. The moving parts mean that the drive is more likely to break down and also limit the speed at which the device can perform.
SSD – Solid State Drive
A recent leap in technology has brought us the age of the SSD which stands for Solid State Drive, it sounds similar to a Hard Disk Drive however the clue to the difference is in the name ‘Solid State’. You’re probably familiar with USB memory sticks – SSD can be thought of as an oversized and more sophisticated version of the USB memory stick. Like a memory stick, there are no moving parts to an SSD. Rather, information is stored in lots and lots of microchips.
These differences are what makes SSD so much faster. As an analogy, Imagine you are cooking a pizza and you need the dough, some sauce, and some cheese and they are all located at in different places in a very big kitchen. You could either have Usain Bolt run to each of the places and grab them for you (spinning disk drive) or you could have three people standing next to each of the ingredients and they throw them to you at the same time (solid state). Assuming that the ‘throwers’ can throw in a straight line and you can catch all three things at the same time – the latter is the quicker of the 2 – Usain Bolt is fast but not that fast.
The downside of Solid State Drives is that they are more expensive than traditional Hard Disk Drives. Therefore, the affordable drives tend to have less capacity. Whilst this is not a problem for most office-based machines, it can be a stumbling block if you store a lot of data on your computer.
How can ESP Projects help?
A number of ESP Projects customers have recently upgraded Laptops and PCs with Solid State Drives and have noticed massive improvements in the speed of their device. Indeed, several of the devices at our offices have been upgraded for this very reason. For anyone struggling with the speed of their Laptop or PC, the cost for most of our customers is likely to be around £130 to switch (inclusive of labour) and it WILL improve the speed of your computer! If you would like to discuss this, please contact sales@espprojects.co.uk or use our contact form.
