For those of you who don't know what an SSD is I invite you to look it up on Google or Wikipedia. Once you know what one is you could spend weeks reading reviews, white papers and comparisons only to find that you still aren't sure if you should buy one, which one you should buy or if it is going to stop working in a year or so down the road. I'd like to help clear up some of that confusion if possible.

A couple of years ago I got my hands on a deduplication appliance to the industry that used Intel X25-E drives. The drives were only 64 GB and at the time I think our cost was around $700 per drive. Since this was a lab machine and the drives were being used in a RAID 1 configuration I was able to remove one and do some testing of my own.

So I connected one of the drives to my Dell Precision M4400 and installed Windows 7 on it. I used it for about 3 weeks for my primary work operations which included log analyzing, spending a lot of time in Outlook, Visual Studio 2008, Chrome, Oracle, MS SQL, Visio, and Virtual Box with two or three VMs running at a time. At some point I put Starcraft 2 on there just to see how it ran but I don't game much on my laptop so I didn't spend much time on it.

I didn't run any benchmarks and I didn't record loading times but I was reminded of when I got my first high speed internet connection vs my 56k dial-up connection way back when. While the people in the office around me were complaining about slow load times and solid hard drive lights I was moving from operation to operation with response times that were almost instantaneous. When I booted my laptop in the morning I would turn around to hang up my jacket and by the time I turned around my system was ready to be used.

It was a game changer...until I had to start actively monitoring my disk space. At 64 GB (57 or so usable) I quickly ran out of space and had to inconvenience myself with moving files. Before long, the responsiveness of the SSD was outweighed by the hassle of watching my disk space. I looked at some disk caddies for my laptop that let me install a second hard drive in the optical drive slot and then I sat down to make a decision for purchasing my own SSD.

At the time, the decent SSDs were $400-$500. Since they weren't large enough to handle all of my data I'd also have to spend $60 on a drive caddy for a 2nd hard drive in my laptop. Ultimately I decided that approximately $500 was not worth the convenience.

I returned the SSD to the lab system and started using my 7200 RPM drive in my laptop again. A few days later I was so frustrated with how slow my laptop was that I started shopping for SSDs again! :D Then I had a baby, kids had some dental bills and other things came up so I forced myself to get used to my really horribly slow hard drive again.

Then, about 8 months ago, I read a review about the OCZ Vertex 3 drive and started saving up for it. Fortunately, I was able to make a deal where I traded some services for the 240GB version. At the time it was around $600.

Was it worth it?

Abso-freakin-lutely! It changed my life. Keep in mind that I work from home on my computer and average 45-50 hours a week. With that in mind, since I installed this SSD, I don't wait for anything. When I click on something, it opens. For the first time in my life, my hard drive is no longer the bottleneck in my system. I replaced two 10,000 RPM WD Raptor drives in RAID0 which were pretty fast as it was and the difference is still comparative to the difference I felt when I upgraded my 56k connection to my first high speed internet connection.

Windows 7 x64 installed in 7 minutes. A reboot takes about 15 seconds. When I open Outlook it just appears. The same goes with Visual Studio 2010. You know that feature with google that gives you search ideas as you type? The ideas actually come up before I'm done typing now. They didn't with my other drive because it was always caching. My 50mpbs internet connection helps with that as well.

When I first installed the Vertex 3 240 GB I had a 780 SLI board with an e6600 core2duo and 4 GB of RAM. The drive was still as fast as I have claimed but I knew it could be faster with an intel controller that supported AHCI and did 6 GB/s. I finally upgraded to an i5 2500k, ASUS p8z68 Pro and 16 GB of RAM. Thanks to my faster CPU and better SATA controller my response time feels even faster. It has actually taken me a minute to get used to and has surprisingly messed with my typing! Previously, I could watch a "sort of" delay between hitting the keys and the letter actually being displayed but now it almost feels as if the letter shows up too fast. So that typing training I've done over the past decade got a bit confused due to that slight delay. :D

In a world where time is money, this drive has paid for itself. I suppose that if you don't work on your computer for a living then the investment may not be worth it but if you've got a PC or laptop that is feeling to slow for you and it has a SATA controller then I would recommend upgrading the hard drive to an SSD before you buy an entire new system. For most systems these days, your bottleneck is going to be your hard drive and a good SSD will remove that bottleneck.

Will an SSD change your life?

I'm often called to a friend or family's house where they complain about their computer being slow. When I sit down the first thing I notice is the sound of the hard drives spinning up and that solid hard drive light. For some systems it can be 5 minutes before it is available to be used. So Grandma wants to send a picture out to the family. She sits down at her computer she bought a couple of years ago and turns it on. 3 minutes. She then browses to aol or gmail and logs into her email. 2 minutes Next she plugs her camera in which starts that crappy software that came with the cheap camera. 3 minutes. She types the email and starts to upload the picture files. The files are busy being imported and the hard drive light is solid. 5 minutes because it has been 6 months since she last connected the camera. Finally the computer becomes responsive enough to attach the files to the email. 2 minutes She hits send and a minute later the email is sent. 1 minute. Next she hits start->shutdown which triggers the installation of the latest updates because she hasn't powered on the PC in a couple of weeks. 20 minutes. If she wants to use the computer in that 20 minutes she's plumb out of luck.

That was 21 minutes that it took Grandma to send her family a couple of pictures! I've seen many systems like this where a RAM upgrade usually gets them down to 10 or 15 minutes for that task.

What if Grandma didn't have to wait for that hard drive? Even if she did run out of RAM the SSD would be used for paging and would be a lot faster. With my system using my OCZ Vertex 3 SSD Grandma could send that email out with attached pictures in 2 minutes flat.

If Grandma could send pictures in 2 minutes flat it would change her life and her entire family's! Mostly because she would now send way too many pictures. :D

The answer to the title, for most PC users, is definitely yes.