Will Upgrading To A Solid-State Drive (SSD) On My Laptop See Noticeable Performance Benefits?

As your laptop gets older and its memory starts to fill up, a decline in performance is inevitable. The system begins to run slower, and the battery drains faster. Your once reliable laptop begins to frustrate you, and your productivity begins to take a hit. You start giving serious thought to ditching the laptop entirely.

However, instead of throwing that laptop away, you should consider upgrading some of its hardware. This way, you’ll save a few hundred dollars, and your laptop will get a significant performance boost.

There are several upgrades that you can make on your laptop to coax improved performance from it, but the one you should really make is to swap the laptop’s HDD for a SSD. The benefits of this switch are instant and remarkable.

Despite the fact that SSD Laptops are quite pricey, they are popular, as this Statista report shows. Thankfully, their prices have been reducing steadily, while the potential for SSDs to be even more is really something to get excited about.

If you finally decide to go for a Solid State Drive, here are some of the things to look out for:

Can I Expect A Fast System Boot Up?

Chances are you’ve experienced the nail-biting angst of starting up your laptop and watching it boot and boot. With an SSD, this kind of situation can be consigned to the distant past. One of the most notable benefits of SSDs is that it speeds everything from up, from boot up to shut down, and everything in between.

There are numbers to back this up too. It takes a laptop equipped with an SSD between 10-13 seconds to boot. Compare this to about 30-40 seconds, which is the average boot time for laptops with a HDD and you’ll see a clear difference. SSDs boast faster copy/write speeds due to their usage of nonvolatile storage media for the storage of repetitive data. Check here for a more detailed breakdown of SSD speeds.

Will There Be A Boost In Performance?

The most recurring complaint that people have with their laptops is reduced speed or a lack of speed entirely. An SSD fixes this issue completely, leading to vastly improved performance. Your laptop will perform faster than ever with an SSD, with greater efficiency. 

An SSD will make your laptop better at multitasking and multithreading, and also help your laptop become more energy effective. Further, an SSD will help cool down your laptop considerably and also bring fan noise to the barest minimum.

In addition to all these, SSDs are more solid and durable than HDDs, so, in the event of accidents, the SSD has a better chance of survival than the HDD, potentially saving you repair or even replacement costs. Add in the fact that a HDD can help save time and improve productivity and you have a winner on every count.

Will It Consume Less or More Power?

There’s a direct reason for the reduced lifespan of your laptop’s battery between charges the fuller and older your HDD gets. HDDs contain lots of small, moving parts which your laptop’s processor has to scour through looking for a particular file or resource. It can become quite taxing on your laptop’s battery overtime having to power each and every one of these parts. SSDs, on the other hand, do not contain any moving parts, making them more energy efficient.

This is of particular advantage to people who commute a lot or who need their laptops to be very mobile. 

Will SSD Make My Laptop Faster?

An SSD will instantly and noticeably make your laptop faster. Your laptop will boot up faster, load programs and applications faster, and shut down faster. If you appreciate instant response to your commands, you’ll definitely enjoy an SSD.As a matter of fact, an SSD speeds up everything about your laptop.

Do you need your laptop to perform harder tasks like gaming, video editing and image rendering? An SSD will help your laptop achieve these tasks with little or no lags. You can also get your laptop to multitask and multithread effectively with an SSD, regardless of how old it is.

Will SSD Make My Laptop Quieter?

The absence of small moving parts in an SSD has a knock-on effect on the quietness of your laptop. Since there are no moving parts in an SSD, you won’t get any of that whirring noise your HDD produces when it’s in operation. Further, your laptop’s fans have an easier time keeping your laptop cool as the reduced operating temperature means that your fans do not have to go into overdrive.

With an SSD, that annoyingly insistent whirring noise that only gets worse as your laptop ages will become a thing of the past.

Even Though They Improve Performance, How Long Do SSDs Last?

Due to the relative newness of SSDs to the market, there’s still a bit of uncertainty about their lifespan. To provide an estimate to this question, tech experts consider the age of the SSD, the drive writes per day, and the total number of terabytes written. For each of these metrics used, however, there are different results.

SSDs are projected to last around 10 years, although this number is shorter in actuality. This report by Google and the University of Toronto also indicates that the age of an SSD plays a major role towards determining its longevity. 

In any case, SSDs are more robust and durable than HDDs, making them better able to cope with bumps and hits, and by extension, making them the longer-lived option.

Does SSD Affect Performance?

There’s an instantly noticeable shift in the performance levels of your laptop when you upgrade from a HDD to an SSD. Your laptop becomes faster, multitasks more efficiently, becomes cooler and quieter, and helps conserve your battery’s life, giving you more juice to perform more tasks between charges.

Away from work, an SSD will help you enjoy a better gaming experience, and video editing is a breeze with an SSD. The higher survival rate that an SSD offers also gives you greater peace of mind and can potentially save you hundreds of dollars.

What Is A Good SSD Speed?

The speed of an SSD is represented by the number of MBs it’s able to process per second. The right SSD speed for you depends on what task you need it to perform. For instance, if you need your laptop to boot faster and load your programs more quickly, a standard SATA SSD with read and write speeds of 300MB/s – 500Mb/s should be enough.

• If you want to enjoy faster gaming, you may need a SATA SSD with read and write speeds of 500Mb/s – 1000MB/s.
• For music production and graphic editing tasks, you should aim for read and write speeds of 500MB/s – 1000MB/s.

Conclusion

Solid state drives (SSDs) are the newest technological advancement in the world of storage, and they have already spawned a huge market for people upgrading their laptops.

In fact, many people today will only consider purchasing a computer with an SSD installed, as it is the only option for a system that has enough speed to perform everyday tasks without any frustration. On top of that, other benefits include no moving parts which means they are way more durable, and they don’t heat up as much as traditional drives – we even have a piece on HDDs vs SSDs.

After addressing the most common questions, it’s pretty clear that upgrading your laptop with an SSD will see noticeable performance increases – making the choice to upgrade is one you won’t look back on!