Solid State Drives are much faster than traditional hard disks
On modern computer systems the biggest performance bottleneck is hard disk speed. Hard disks have increased phenomenally in size over the years but seek times, the time it takes for the drive heads to reach a specific location on the platters, have not improved very much at all. In the mid 1970's hard drives were available with seek times of around 25 milliseconds and today an average desktop hard drive has a seek time of around 9 milliseconds.
When your hard drive is furiously fetching data from many different locations on the disk, those seek times quickly add up. When your computers hard drive light goes on and stays on for many seconds at a time your hard drive is busy hopping from one location to another fetching data while you wait and twiddle your thumbs.
A Solid State Drive achieves a huge reduction in seek times and transfer rates faster than a hard drive. This adds up to massive performance gains especially when dealing with many small files.
SSD seek times are typically on the order of 85 microseconds, roughly 100 times as fast as a conventional hard drive. Of course, this does not mean that your computer will be 100 times faster but in actual use you can expect it to be about four times faster on any work that requires a lot of hard disk access.
There are limitations
Firstly, large file copying only improves a little because transfer speeds are not boosted by nearly as much as seek times. This means that if you are working with huge files, as in professional video editing, large RAID arrays still give you the best bang for your buck.
Secondly, work that is maxing out other components on your computer such as the graphics card for games or the CPU for media conversion will not benefit much because the hard drive is not the performance bottleneck in those cases.
Having said that, applications that will benefit from a huge performance boost include:
- Any type of database - Pastel, Quickbooks, other business systems
- Server applications like web servers or MS Exchange
- Image editing programs like Photoshop
- Office applications
- Games will load levels much more quickly
Pretty much across the board, once you have worked with an SSD based computer you will not want to go back to the constant delays of a hard drive based machine again.