Every day in the morning, when you turn on your computer, it takes up to several minutes until you can start working. We all know the annoying sound of the hard drive reading all data at startup. So what about installing a Solid State Drive (SSD) and get rid of this whole process?

Yes – SSDs are much faster at reading data and the daily boot process becomes a pleasure with a SSD. As SSDs doesn’t have a spinning plate inside, their totally soundless. A computer without the innervating sound of the running hard drive? Yes – Now it’s possible! But SSDs have cons, too. The writing process is much slower than on regular hard drives. This means, that the boot process, which is mostly a reading process will be finished much faster, but when you’re doing write extensive tasks your work progress will become much slower. If you’re still fine with this, here’s what you need to do, when switching to a SSD.

The first thing to do is to identify your hard drive controller. You can do this by calling the systems device manager. What you need to benefit from a fast SSD is a Serial ATA interface. If your computer has an older interface like IDE or a parallel one it’s not worth to switch. The controller will become the bottleneck.

When your computer is a desktop PC, your hard drive size will be 3.5″. Notebooks usually have a 2.5″ or 1.8″ drive build in. Open the computer (of course turn it off before and take out the plug) carefully and unplug the existing hard drive. Install the SSD and connect it. After installation, go to your BIOS and start the hardware identification so that your computer will recognize the new hardware.

Although the price for SSDs has decreased a lot regular hard drives are still much cheaper and you get bigger sizes. Additional to the faster reading, SSDs have a lower battery consumption, which can keep a notebook a few hours on, compared with a regular drive. Take a few minutes to think if it’s worth to switch or if it’s better to wait a bit longer.

Dominik writes for soft-evolution, a software vendor which has specialized on team- and collaboration sofware. soft-evolution is developer of an Outlook Alternative which was designed for small and mid-sized companies.