Solid-state drives (SSD)… if you haven’t heard of them, you soon will.  They’re great for music players because there are very little moving parts involved; they don’t skip or corrupt as easy when transporting them from location to location on a daily basis.  So if something like this has been so popular in recent years in a little music player, than why not apply it to everyday computing?

Unfortunately the SSD’s of today are having live down the ’sins of their fathers’.  First-generation SSD’s were littered with errors and caveats.  The two major errors being 1) That the drives would fail impossibly fast (read/write cycles were limited) and 2) that the drives were impossibly expensive (read here as cost prohibitive for just about any average joe).  While these issues were true for the first-generation SSD’s, we’ve come a long, LONG way since then.The SSD’s of today no longer have the short life span (indeed most will outlive your platter spinner by a great deal), and while these drives are still arguably expensive, they are no where near the costs of yesteryear.  It’s also important to realize that you get what you pay for, and in the battle of Hard Drive (HD) vs Solid State Drive (SSD), this is clearly the case.  Let me explain…

I was first introduced to using an SSD for everyday computing when I set up my Dell Mini 9 netbook.  I could rant and rave about the wonders of this awesome, little companion, but I’ll digress and save that for another post.  The point is that, when I bought this netbook, I quickly upgraded it’s RAM and the stock drive to a fast SSD.  The results were utterly phenomenal.

Back in the day when one of your non-tech friends asked you, “How do I make my computer faster?” you’d always respond in one of two ways, “Buy more RAM.” or “Do a fresh install.”  To be quite honest RAM, while an affordable upgrade, doesn’t truly make your computer faster, it just lets you do more at any given time.  A fresh install will restore your computer to ‘factory-fresh’ condition, but its a pain to do and requires a large amount of time.  Let me just say that installing an SSD is the single-most amazing upgrade you can perform on your machine if you are looking for a speed boost in everyday computing.

“Ummm… okay, but isn’t this post about the significance of using an SSD in conjunction with my design profession?” Good point, lets get to the specifics of that…

SSD’s up until this point have been floating around in tech-head circles.  You know what I’m talking about.  The IT officianados who outfit their systems with the latest and greatest even though they don’t come anywhere close to utilizing that raw processing power.  I’m not knocking them- after all they are the ones that test drive this stuff into the ground to make sure its good for the rest of us.  Now, while the tech heads were ranting and raving about SSD’s the rest of us have been complaining about the cost of these things and not giving them a chance- “An SSD is how much?!?  Forget that, I’m going to buy a top of the line HD with double the space for half the price!”  Makes sense on the surface right?  But let’s take a closer look at why that’s flawed thinking.

An SSD is fast… no seriously, REALLY fast.  There is not a HD out there that will even come close to competing with an ENTRY level SSD.  SSD’s range in speed (rated by the speed at which they read/write files on your system), but one things for sure, they’re all fast when compared to a standard HD.

As designers, we’ve swallowed the myth that RAM is what we need the most.  Back 2-5 years ago this was somewhat true.  Computer manufactures, for whatever reason, sorely under equipped their machines with RAM.  Those were the days of 256 and 512mb of RAM as a standard.  Designers soon realized the limiting effects this had on their day to day operations and would quickly upgrade to 1, 2, 4 and sometime 8gb of RAM (though to be quite honest, anything over 4gb is overkill for your standard designer who isn’t doing much video work).  Fast forward to the machines of today and you realize that manufacturers finally have taken the hint.  Its unusual to purchase a modern production machine that has anything less than 2gb RAM.

Which brings me to my point- of all the computer processing variables and components, which one(s) are currently the most important for the graphic designer?

In my opinion, the single most important processing variable for the designer is the read/write cycles.  And that is completely dependent on your hard disk.  Years ago I worked as a designer for a large format print shop.  It was not uncommon for us to save files in excess of 1gb in file size.  This meant that saving (writing) and opening (reading) processes took large amounts of time.  To counter this issue we’d run multiple machines at any given time via a KVM switch.  At one point I was running three beastly machines at once with open and save operations running simultaneously on all three machines.  This was an odd workflow for sure, but it was the only way we could get around the amazing amount of time necessitated from these large file sizes.

With an SSD however this issue is virtually eliminated.  I recently was able to apply this to a real-world situation.  My work computer at the time was not equipped with an SSD.  I was tasked with creating tradeshow-sized displays.  The designing and saving of these huge files took me an entire (9 hour) work day.  The following day I worked from home and used my SSD-equipped netbook (yeah, that’s right my netbook) to accomplish the same size task and I did it in 2 hours.  Let me say that again: 2 HOURS (that means I was able to do the same task in 22% of the time it took me the previous day)!  This is where we get to the crux of the matter- for designers this is an upgrade you can’t afford not to make.  If you’re someone who loses a lot of time saving and opening files, then this upgrade will pay for itself as you regain precious time for your business.

A large SSD may be cost prohibitive for you, but you don’t need a large SSD to start benefitting from the speed bonuses an SSD provides.  Designers looking for speed boosts in OS startup and application launching will benefit from buying a small SSD drive (anywhere from 16gb-32gb) to dedicate to their OS and applications while they use a larger HD for file storage.  This means that everything will launch extremely quickly and you won’t lose precious time waiting as your machine slowly chugs through launching procedures.  However, if you want to gain the speed benefits of fast file saves and opens I’d recommend investing in a larger SSD (64-128Gb… anything large just isn’t cost effective in my opinion at this point) that will allow you to store more than just your OS and applications.

My personal favorite option for upgrading to an SSD is Kingston’s 64gb and 128gb SSD upgrade kits.  These kits, though not the fastest SSD on the market (but hey that’s like comparing a Ferrari to a BMW sports car… sure the Ferrari is faster and more expensive, but are you really going to be less impressed with the speed and quality of the BMW?) are at an awesome price point.  While still somewhat pricy, they won’t break the bank and you’ll get far more in return then you shelled out over the course of time.  These work in pretty much any machine with SATA2 capability.

To sum up, an SSD drive is the single best upgrade you can make to your machine as a designer.  There is nothing else currently on the market that will provide as much of a speed boost to your workflow as this.