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A couple years ago, I wrote about upgrading my laptop from an HDD to an SSD. The change in performance was awesome, but the longevity of that particular SSD – not so much. Long story short, the SSD bricked, I went through the replacement process, then discovered that software encryption does not work on an SSD. There’s a technical explanation for this if you care to go down that particular rabbit hole.

I have a self-imposed requirement of full encryption on any laptop I travel with –  two words: “identity theft”. The issue at hand is that if your laptop is stolen, even assuming you have Windows passwords, etc., it’s a pretty simple matter to pull the drive out, mount it and read all the data on it. Unacceptable.

Before moving on to the result of the new SSD upgrade, I’ll spend a few words on “Why you would care” (above and beyond the onboard encryption)…

The picture above shows the major subsystems of a computer –  PC / Mac / iPhone, supercomputer, whatever, all have rough equivalents.

• CPU –  the brains of the outfit; where all the thinking goes on.
• Memory –  AKA RAM, AKA fast and expensive, this is where the information needed for the things you are working on or looking at right now (like on your desktop) is stored. Important point –  the information in RAM disappears when the computer is turned off. That’s why you’re prompted to “save work” when you’re shutting down or restarting your computer.
• Video Card –  processes the information needed to change what you’re looking at on a computer screen.
• Hard Disk –  the computer equivalent of a file cabinet or library. Information that you need kept for the long term is stored here. I’ll insert an editorial comment here  –  if there’s information (pictures, videos, spreadsheets, letters, etc) that is really important to you, you’ll have a backup copy of that information in some safe place.
• Motherboard –  ties everything together and provides lines of communication between the subsystems, including, but not shown, your mouse / touchpad / keyboard.

All of these subsystem components are currently running at speeds such that individual events happen in a range of .000000001 second or less – except the hard drive, where things happen in the .001 second range – in other words, the hard disk is the horse and buggy at the Indy car race. An SSD, being fully electronic, gets long term storage back in the race.

OK, lots of technical verbiage –  here are a list of things that will happen much faster on an SSD system vs an HDD system:

• “Boot” time –  from when you turn your computer on until it’s ready for you do something. On my laptop, this went from over a minute down to 21 seconds.
• Installing a program
• Launching a program
• Tagging pictures
• Editing videos
• Backing up your hard drive

Bottom line –  your computer will ‘feel’ far faster overall in every circumstance that involves the drive.

Back to the upgrade –  two things have happened since a couple years ago –  1) Intel produced a secure solution, and 2) I’m home with time to mess with a laptop.

I installed the new Intel SSD, did a clean Windows 7 install (from a thumb drive, what an improvement that is!), and set up the BIOS HDD password. Then I downloaded 64–bit benchmarking software from PassMark and ran the tests on the old system (HDD) and the new system (SSD). The  resulting awesomeness in chart form:

The most important number to you is the ‘Random R/W’ number –  a more than 50 times improvement. At first I thought “there must be some mistake” –  until I remembered that the HDD is the equivalent of buggy-whip technology in a computer. HDD technology was invented in the early 1950’s, and although optimized to the nth degree by the subsequent 60 years of development, still remains dependent on rotating disks and moving arms –  and mechanical things cannot physically move at the speeds of electronic circuitry.

Armed with that, plus a little cross-referencing on other testers’ results, and –  I’m good with that number.

Bottom line –  the single biggest change in performance for that aging laptop or desktop system might well be to get rid of that HDD and replace it with an SSD –  and if you also require the security of drive encryption, at least consider the Intel 320 series.

Namaste, Rick

P.S. –  if you happen to be thinking about a new laptop, be sure to consider the new Ultrabooks, a little competion for the MacBook Air…

P.P.S. –  this my first blog entry edited entirely offline. MUCH more pleasurable. Thanks, Amy!!!