If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time on the computer. You have years upon years of experience using computers, and you’re approaching light speed at completing digital tasks. However, your computer is not. Every time you start it up, your computer does its best attempt to mock and imitate the way you wake up on a Saturday morning, taking far too long and trying to convince you to just let it go back to sleep. However, computers aren’t people; they don’t get tired (unless they run out of battery). Why are computers so slow?
It may appear at the surface that a computer is simply slow because the processor is outdated and the computer needs to be replaced. However, there are several ways in which a computer can be lacking the resources it needs to perform. One of the most common reasons that a computer is slow is not because the processor (often described as the “brain”) is slow, but rather because the storage device is slow.
Storage devices for personal computers come in many shapes and sizes. In the ancient past (read: a few years ago), data was stored on floppy discs. These were large, had capacities measured in kilobytes or megabytes, and most importantly, had bandwidths of about 1 Mb/s. Until recently, most storage was on hard drives (or hard disc drives, or HDDs), which were 100 times faster than floppy discs and had 10,000 more storage capacity. Keep in mind that the time span between these technologies was only a decade or two; technology improves significantly every year.
Today, most devices run on solid state drives (SSDs). These run on a fundamentally different type of technology. While CDs, DVDs, floppy discs, and hard drives all operated by writing and reading from spinning discs, solid state drives read and write from transistors. Thus, they are solid state because there are no moving parts, which makes them far, far more durable than previous mechanical forms of storage. However, that is not the main reason why they are used today.
We use them because they are crazy fast. Obscenely fast, even. They’re fast enough to transcribe the entirety of the English language Wikipedia in under a minute. They are obviously more expensive than hard drives, but computer manufacturers have learned that this is the feature that makes their computers feel fast.
This video demonstrates the real-world impact of an SSD
There still are applications which require large amounts of processing power; professions in the sciences and digital arts require professional (expensive) computers to do the job. However, most users don’t synthesize new data and content on their computers; they are simply looking to retrieve data that already exists on their computer or on the internet. They turn on their computer, check their email, watch videos, move documents, search the internet, and turn off their computer. All the computer is doing is shuffling things around, whether from the internet to the computer or from the storage drive to the user’s eyeballs.
That is why having a fast storage drive is important. If your computer is slow, it’s probably because your computer uses a hard drive. Fortunately, upgrading a hard drive to a solid state drive is as simple as backing up your data, unplugging one small metal rectangle, plugging in the new slightly smaller metal rectangle, and re-downloading the backup.* However, that’s a blog post for another day.