Best Computer Upgrade For the Money Ever

My Computer is so Slow, What is the Best Upgrade?

There is an upgrade that may double the speed of your computer. If you have a fairly new and powerful computer, but are still disappointed in performance, I have the perfect upgrade for you; a solid state disk drive. This is a storage device that has no moving parts. Think of it like a big thumb or flash drive, but for your main operating system.

This upgrade will primarily help if your feel like your computer start up time or application loading time is too slow. If you are like me, I had a quad core computer with lots of ram but it still had trouble keeping up with my demands. So I added some 10,000 RPM SCSI drives I had laying around from old servers that were not very large, but when combined together into a RAID 10 ( mirror + stripe ) it made a decent root C: drive. I had six drives in this combination plus another drive for the swap file, and a few big SATA drives to store pictures, video, and music.

The performance from this system was pretty good, but it was power hungry and generated a lot of heat. Plus the high RPM drives had a faint high pitch whine that bothered me sometimes. My real complaint was the heat, which living in Florida meant dedicated air conditioning most of the time. The throughput from this array was great and access times ran in the 5ms range. ( most hard drives run 9-11ms ). This access time is the *average* time it takes for the hard drive to locate the information on the disc. Because the disc is spinning, it has to wait for the right part of the disc to come under the head in order for it to read the data.

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