Off topic - go buy an SSD

My wife and I went to a crawfish boil last night in Palo Alto, with lots of well connected and technology savvy folks from silicon valley. After a few cocktails, we got talking about the most innovative technology products right now that really make a difference - both to use personally and in business and to invest in.

Cloud computing was of course a hot topic on the business front - but on the personal side of things what surprised me was none of the folks I was talking with, in a very technologically savvy crowd - were using Solid State Drives (SSDs) in their personal PCs.

For the last nine months, I've been using an SSD in my laptop instead of the normal laptop hard disc. It's easily the best personal technology upgrade I've made in years - I like it so much I want to recommend SSDs to everyone reading this blog.

Switching from a regular old hard disc to an SSD made my old slow laptop super fast and a pleasure to use again.

Solid state drives use flash memory chips instead of a spinning platter like a hard drive to store your data. Externally they look just like a regular laptop hard drive - it's just the guts inside that are different (and way better.) They are more expensive than regular laptop hard drives, but they are so much faster that you will be far more productive - the ROI is a no-brainer.

Now I can go from turning on the laptop to having windows running plus have Outlook and my web browser open in under a minute. With the same laptop, with a a regular old hard drive, starting the system and getting into the same applications was at least a five minute process - and it always felt even longer.

Now, with the SSD, new applications start up instantly - they just pop open immediately - there is no lag time at all. Searches for files are also instant. Plus since there are no moving parts in an SSD, my laptop is completely silent and the laptop battery lasts longer too. My laptop is a 3 year old IBM Thinkpad - an SSD is a going to be a huge improvement whether you have an old or a new PC.

I'm using a 120 gigabyte SSD from a company called OCZ. It costs about $320 from Amazon or NewEgg. While this is more than triple the price of a standard hard drive - I figure I'm at least 15-30 minutes more productive every day just by not waiting around for Windows to start of for applications to run or for searches to complete. Literally every task you do on your PC is faster.

There are lots of other SSD choices - Intel makes SSDs, so do Kingston, Corsair and Crucial. I chose the OCZ Vertex because it got great reviews on NewEgg.com, and 120 Gigabytes was the right size for me, and just over $300 seemed a reasonable price.

To install the new drive- you use disc cloning software like Acronis which your IT person is likely to already have, to copy everything on your old drive over to the new SSD. You'll also need an inexpensive USB or eSata adapter like this for the new SSD so you can have both it and your old drive plugged in to your laptop at the same time. It take about 1/2 hour to clone your old disc to the new SSD. Then you just unplug your old hard drive, and plug in the new SSD, and you're done.

SSDs aren't just for laptops and personal PCs - they are making a huge difference in the corporate data center as well. Innovative companies like Fusion-io are doing amazing things in the enterprise server world -with flash-based drives that are hundreds to thousands of times faster than disc drives.

I like this technology so much I thought it was worthy of an off topic post. My advice - if you use a computer much or most of the day, replace your old hard drive with an SSD as soon as you can. It will pay for itself in weeks in terms of making you more productive. It's really that much better.