Be Spoiled by the SSD

There is nothing better than unboxing that new hardware that promises the sweet taste of greater performance. It's that upgrade you have been yearning for the past few months and you finally have it. This is what I felt when I got my first ever SSD home.

The clickity-clackity HDD had been failing me before. Always heating up and making buzzing sounds as it spun up. My stinginess got the better of me so I held off on buying a new one. In retrospect I don’t know why I tortured myself for so long.

The difference was day and night. Not only did the solid state drive consume less power and space, but there was also less chance of drive failure since there are no moving parts! No longer was I chained to the physical limitations of the traditional hard drive - I had in my hand a device that would spoil me.

Let me start off my telling you that I am not the most gentle of person when it comes to hardware. I wrecked a few hard drives on the way to my first SSD. Whether it was from rough transport or hardware failure, a lot of precious data had been lost over the years. On top of that, I had to clear out my hard drive every so often or else it would have slowed to a crawl.

With the SSD upgrade my system only took seconds to boot. It made my programs more responsive. Large databases? No problem. Layers of assets on your 3D rendering file? Piece of cake. Games? Goodbye loading screens. Even if you aren't using it for heavy duty applications, just having one sitting in your computer makes all the difference between wanting to throw the computer out the window and feeling the computer is working with you. Once you go fast, you can't go back.

Now that I’ve experienced first hand the speeds of SSD, I’m thinking of spoiling myself more with the speed. I can think of easy applications where the SSD can fit in so easily and replace such as in an external hard drive enclosure, HDD dock, or those USB 3.0 to SATA adapters which can make external storage even more of a pleasure to use.

I recently convinced my friend with a relatively ancient computer to upgrade his HDD to SSD. Understandably, he doubted that a new storage device could make a difference. I found his lack of faith disturbing.

After some convincing and telling him that even his old SATA 2 interface would still be quicker than the HDD, we finally struck a deal - if he didn't like the SSD, I would take it off his hand. Let's just say the first and only time I saw his SSD was when he bought it from the store. No word on my offer yet.

All in all, the SSD is just making my computing experience so much better. From off to Windows, from desktop to game, from game to work - all done in seconds. The only issue I have now is that I am no longer able to finish reading those tips and lore on loading screens.

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