What is SSD and should my MacBook have one?

One of the main reasons that laptop performance lags behind that achieved on desktops is down to one thing. Hard drive performance. Modern computers running MacOS or Windows spend a large part of their time writing temporary data to the hard drive, and that’s 1000s of times slower than reading data from memory (RAM). This means that the faster the hard drive, the more quickly the computer can continue doing what you asked it to do.

Laptops have slower drives than desktops, simply because the disks are less wide and hence the read heads are passed over the drive surface more slowly. Recently Solid State Drives, (SSDs) have started to solve this problem – instead of storing data on magnetised metal platters, they use RAM chips. Currently they are very expensive, but the performance boost is very noticeable, especially if you are using ‘scratch disk’ intensive programs like Photoshop.

You can custom configure any MacBook you buy from the AppleStore with an SSD, so next time you’re in the market for new hardware, give it some thought…