A laptop was brought in that was not booting into windows. The drive was diagnosed as faulty and an upgrade to a solid state drive was recommended.
When a computer reads data from a hard drive it uses technology similar to any record, CD or DVD player. It is limited by the rotation speed of the platters to read and write from the disc that is spinning. Due to this moving part it uses a large amount of power and is fragile to shocks. One way that hard drives have improved over time is by increasing the RPM they spin at, a standard drive will run at 5400RPM, some hard drives will be labelled as “green” or “power saving” meaning that they operate at a lower RPM.
A solid state drive uses circuitry to store data and is has no moving parts. As it has no moving parts and doesn’t require a spinning disc it is less fragile to shocks. While an SSD upgrade doesn’t improve the clock speed of a computer, it means that the data can be read more rapidly allowing shorter boot, program and application launch times. An average improvement is about 1000% increase in speed of reading.
The upgrade for the laptop brought in was successful and the user’s data was migrated to the new drive. The laptop is faster than it was out of the shop, but set up how the user likes it.
