Upgrading HDD to SSD for performance boost

Shift from HDD to SSD

Many of you would have heard about Solid State Drive which in short is called SSD. It has been around for long time, and it offers superb performance compared to HDD. Many people have been thinking that HDD is cheap, has plenty of capacity, whereas SSD is considered as expensive. But now, the technology around SSD has brought it to be cheaper while maintaining a good performance compared to HDD.

Previously, SSD uses Single-level cell (SLC) which means that it contains one bit per cell. Then followed by multi-level cell which contains two bits per cell. Triple-level cell (TLC) and Quad-level cell (QLC) comes afterwards. The more bit contained within a cell, the slower and less durable it is, but it is cheaper. For consumer level, the trend is at TLC and QLC.

Different interfaces also affects performance by high-margin. A SATA SSD normally has read/write performance of 500 MB/s, where those NVMe based SSD can easily exceeds 3,000MB/s. You may wonder, why not choose NVMe instead? Well, it depends on your motherboard whether it supports SATA or NVMe. In my case, since my laptop is quite old, it does not have NVMe slot so I have to stick with a SATA SSD.

A second-life for an aging laptop 

I have an 8 year old laptop that is still usable. Despite being usable, it shows signs of slowing down. HDD does not slow down with age, but the applications running on it are getting more demanding. Depending on your computer specification, the bottleneck can be the storage drive. If you see in Task Manager that your Disk active time keeps hitting 100%, you know that it's the bottleneck. My laptop runs on 3rd-generation Intel processor with 10 Gigabytes of RAM. For day-to-day operation like browsing, this is sufficient. But still, the slowness upon OS startup and opening the programs are obvious. So I decided to buy an SSD.

In the internet era, especially now where Covid-19 is still out in the wild, e-commerce has been booming and there are plenty of sales. I bought Seagate BarraCuda Q1 SSD 480 GB during the 11.11 sales on a e-commerce platform for $79. It is a QLC based SSD which uses SATA 6Gbps interface.

Seagate BarraCuda Q1 SSD

Performance benchmark

So now is the time to test performance to see whether it can really give a boost to my aging laptop. My laptop had a 5,400 rpm 500GB hard disk. Below is the result:


Western Digital Scorpio Blue 5,400 rpm  HDD

 
Seagate BarraCuda Q1 SSD

Looking at the result above, it clearly indicates that SSD performs at multiple times faster than HDD. It performs at least 7 times better for the sequential read/write and the difference is even more obvious for the random read/write which is up to 70 times faster! I also feel that my laptop takes less time to boot up the OS and open the programs.

So if you have a old PC or laptop that you use for light usage (not gaming of course - this will require an upgrade of CPU/GPU and which sometimes require you to change the motherboard as well), you may check whether you are using a HDD and that it is the source of bottleneck. If it is so, then you can consider to buy SSD to get a performance boost without spending too much money.

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