There are two things that every boss and manager are always looking to improve – the speed and quality with which they can deliver their service or product.
When it comes down to running a business, especially smaller or medium enterprises, every second counts. Any time a minute comes off a process here, a few seconds saved there, the business is saving money, and over time, those minutes and seconds add up.
That is why more and more business with a Mac-based computer infrastructure are appraising and moving over to SSD (Solid-State Drive) storage. However, savings in time are not the only benefit of SSDs and, as we will see below, there are many other rewards from upgrading to SSDs.
Before looking at why SSD upgrades are becoming popular in Mac-running businesses, it is a good idea to get a firm grip on how they work and how they differ from traditional hard drives.
Inside a traditional hard drive, the kind found in PCs and laptops across the land, there is a spinning disk and a moving, magnetic head that writes and reads data on the disk. This is that whirring, clicking sound that accompanies every early morning PC boot up.
Solid-state drives, rather than having moving parts like a traditional hard drive, instead utilise microchips to store their data.
A hard drive with moving parts must wait when booting up for the disk to get up to speed, literally, and, since data can fragment over a large area of the disk, this can cause very slow boot up and operating speeds. It is the common problem that anyone with an older computer has experienced – the older and fuller a hard drive becomes, the slower the computer becomes.
SSDs, because they don’t have to pull data from a disk, do not experience such issues. A SSD does not have to physically search the disk for data like a traditional hard drive, leading to much improved speeds overall.
As was said above, speed of delivery is one of the holy grails of business. The quicker a service or product can find its way to the customer, the more a business can accomplish.
This is why more and more bosses are looking to the SSD solution for their Mac-using employees.
A Mac running a traditional hard drive might take a minute or more to boot, with further waiting for applications to get up to speed and the computer to truly wake up. With a SSD, this boot time becomes mere seconds and most certainly outstripping the speed of any standard hard drive. This comes back to the above point about seconds and minutes adding up over time.
Even once both types of drive are up to speed and running optimally, a traditional hard drive simply cannot match the performance of a SSD. Applications, from document creation, spreadsheets, videos, accounting software – anything that a business needs to run, will run at lightning speeds with a solid-state drive.
In addition, having multiple applications open at the same time, as is so often the need in high-paced business environments, does not present a problem to a SSD. Whereas a normal hard drive might slow to a crawl, a SSD ploughs ahead at the same speed.
A normal hard drive, with its disk and magnetic moving head, is quite vulnerable to damage. Even what seems like a minor fall for a laptop can have serious, lasting damage.
When a hard drive is in operation and the hard drive is hard at work, the magnetic head is moving across the surface of the disk at high speeds and the whole operation is a sensitive one. Having this process disrupted by a sudden jolt or fall can cause massive hard drive damage, which, in turn, means damaged or lost files.
A SSD, however, has no such moving parts. Because an SSD stores data on microchips, which are much less susceptible to impacts, data is safer from accidents and other bumps and bangs. In business environments, where staff might regularly travel off-site with business Macs loaded with important data, this provides a level of protection and peace of mind that a traditional hard drive cannot.
Moving data quickly from one point to another is an important part of most businesses, whether it is accounting reports or customer details.
Everyone who has worked in an office has experienced the long wait for files to copy from a hard drive to a portable USB or similar device. Especially if dealing with large volumes of data, this can be an interminable process. When a business need to move quickly, this is not the ideal.
A SSD drive, with its super-quick performance, copies files in the blink of an eye, making moving or distributing data a quick and easy process.
In addition, a SSD will not take all your files with it should the worst ever happen. When a traditional hard drive comes to the end of its life, everything on it can disappear. If this is a business hard drive and those are, say, accounts on the hard drive, this represents a massive problem.
This is not the case with a SSD, however. When a SSD crashes, which is rare, it only prevents further writing to the drive. Every piece of data remains intact and accessible to the business. For a business, this is a massively important feature.
