Have you ever waited several minutes for your computer to start, or been annoyed by slow file transfers. Those days are over! SSDs (Solid State Drives) are here and they are a game changer. No longer will you be left twiddle your thumbs while your slow PC struggles. Oh, there are no moving parts so it is completely quiet. These things will change you relationship with computing forever. They are the best upgrade you will ever do.

I am doing an upgrade on my almost 15 years old home desktop so I can do audio recording on it. The computer has an Athlon CPU with 4 cores, with a clock speed of about 2.4MHz, it’s plenty fast enough to do what I need it to do.

I need to do fast file transfers to a USB 3.0 hard-drive . This PC does not have USB 3.0, so I bought a PCI Express, USB 3.0 card.

The RAM is okay at 8GBs. I’ll have to try it to see if that is enough for what I’m doing. My motherboard will take up to 16 GB.

I have a couple of 2 terabyte drives I’m using for data storage.

The biggest upgrade by far is the Samsung EVO250BG SSD to put my operating system and apps on. It will speed up music production and pretty much everything else considerably. I will probably the put the projects that I’m working on on the SSD as well since it has 250GB, a lot more than I need for the OS and programs.

SSDs are really starting to get cheep. You can get a 1 terabyte drive for $100 – $150. My Samsung EVO 250GB cost $44.99. What a big difference a few years makes.

Quite awhile back I bought a inexpensive laptop with a spinning drive. Just another so underpowered laptop. With some difficulty I put an SSD in it and to this day I use it for music production an photo editing. (It will not render video.) It only has 4 gigs of RAM so that can slow you down a bit. I am currently mixing a song that has close to 50 tracks. With all of those tracks the system really bogs down.

SSDs come in multiple formfactors. with old computers you have to get a SSD in a box that connects using a SATA connecter. Newer computers have s slot. The SSD looks like a RAM stick. A little secret, that stick that looks like RAM is what’s in the SATA SSD case. Get whatever goes in you machine. Sorry, no ATA connectors here!

Whatever you do, don’t by or build a new computer without getting an SSD! I am exaggerating a little when I say, IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!