Windows 7: How to Switch to a Solid-State Drive

November 30, 2009 6:00 PM

How to Switch to a Solid-State Drive

By Patrick Miller, PC World

Prices on solid-state drives are dropping, and operating systems (particularly Windows 7) are beginning to take advantage of the potential higher speeds of SSDs, so it's a good time to consider slapping one in your computer.

Why Switch?



Though SSDs tend to be faster overall than hard-disk drives, their speed advantage doesn't hold across the board. Normally an SSD reads data at a much quicker rate than an HDD does (Intel claims that a typical HDD takes 4000 microseconds to access your data, versus the advertised 65 ms of the company's 160GB X25-M SSD model); but an SSD's write speeds may be slower than those of a 5400-rpm HDD.