Technologies advance as time goes by. Take a look at your smartphone. Most likely it is more powerful than a laptop you had some 10 years ago. Sometimes progress comes in baby steps when things improve gradually year after year but every once in a while tech progress makes a jump. A new technology, new possibilities and eventually new level of user experience. This thought just occurred to me when I swapped an old HDD in my laptop for a shiny new SSD. Loading time was so much faster it blew my mind. People get used to good things quite fast and if your desktop computer, Mac or laptop came with SSD pre-installed you take that benefit for granted but when you make a switch, I can’t stress enough how big of a difference you get. Even though HDDs nowadays are still manufactured and still develop, they are gradually being replaced by SSDs and there are at least 2 big reasons for that, the first being SPEED. If you are an HDD owner you only need to see it in action once. The second big advantage of SSDs is shock and vibration resistance. In a HDD you have rotating parts inside with discs spinning up to 7200 RPM! Moving parts means HDDs are prone to wear and tear and they particularly don’t like being moved while operating which is often the case when you use a laptop on the go. As for SSDs… well, there’s simply NO rotating parts. They are not claimed to be immortal, of course. Their life is measured in TBW or otherwise write/re-write cycles. So, if, for example your SSD life span is claimed to be 150 TBW (Terabytes Written) that means you need to write about 5Gb of data each day for 82 years straight for your solid state drive to possibly fail. Now that to me sound pretty impressive. A new SSD will not cost you a fortune if you aim for somewhere between 250 – 500 Gb of storage. The main advantage of a classic HDD is its price. HDDs are simply cheaper. But if you ask me if it’s worth overpaying for a SSD I say its worth every single penny! Are you a stingy person that would rather save some $20-30 and sacrifice your time waiting each time  your machine boots or opens a program?  As for me, I can only see old classic Hard Disc Drives good for one thing now – to store data that you rarely access. As a backup or an archive of a sort.

So, when you feel tempted to give it a try I recommend that you go for companies that know their business. Names like WD, Seagate and Samsung. There are way more companies making SSDs now but again, looking for a cheaper option you might end up loosing what you originally set out for – speed. Take your time, learn some more and enjoy the benefits of new technologies.