Solid-state drives are very expensive, but make an incredible difference to the speed at which one’s computer works. An SSD 256 GB drive costs approximately R2 200,00 at the moment and so it is probably not going to be put in every employee’s computer at whatever firm you work at, but if you have the money it is well worth putting it in your own personal computer. The major difference is that solid-state drives don’t have moving parts and use NAND flash memory and this allows much more responsive speeds and lightning fast boot-up times.

The solid-state drive is far faster than a normal hard drive and even though they are smaller, if you load all of your programs onto the SSD drive and perhaps save your photographs on an older, cheaper drive, you will find that your programs load far faster than before. Ideally you would put your Windows program, Outlook and Word, etc all on this drive and save all of your other documents, videos and photographs on a normal, conventional drive. A typical hard drive, and we are talking about the fastest hard drives, would probably read data at 200 Mb per second at the moment whereas a typical SSD drive would read the data at about 540 Mb, meaning that your programmes will load up probably three times faster on a SSD drive compared to the fastest hard drive, which most people won’t in any event have. Apparently another advantage that SSD drives have is that they are not susceptible to damage from vibrations or movement. Obviously, their cost will come down with time and when they do, we are going to see a lot more of them in the workplace.