Just how much of a difference will a SSD make from a "Performance" HDD?

Just how much of a difference will a SSD make from a performance HDD is my question. My current laptop has what is called a "performance HDD", the manufacturer does not specify the brand however it is 7200RRM which apparently is really good.

I'm considering investing in a new laptop with a SSD for superior performance, but the thing is just how much of a performance increase can I expect?

 

We are in search for info about the reliability of the SSD since we are also in the process of canvassing to buy a new laptop. And for the storage, we are very interested in the solid state drive because it has no moving parts unlike the HDD. We have a sad experience with the HDD before when we bought an external HDD which was overheating when used continuously. With the SSD, I don't think it will have a manifestation like that.

 

A ssd drive will give you improvements, a little hard to fully explain
the benefits.


If you are writing or moving a large piece of software then it's great,
installation of software will be much quicker.

Programs like antivirus and anti-malware that interrogate a machine
will be much much quicker.

If you are expecting a very fast internet then there's not going to be
as fast as you may be expecting, however loading things off the
internet will be very quick.

 

An SSD makes a remarkable difference most of the time, no matter what the rest of the hardware you are using is.
To put it in perspective, my machine's boot time on some WD Green Drive (7200RPM as well) usually floats around the 45 second mark, while with a (quite old at this point) 520 series SSD from Intel it rarely ever gets about 20-25 seconds. That's about half as much. Other advantages of SSD vs HDD would be dropping less frames in high FPS movies and games, your data would be less likely to be damaged by physical impact (SSDs don't much care for magnetic fields and are more durable than HDDs thanks to their lack of moving components) and faster load times in frequently used applications. Solid State Drives generally have a smoother learning curve when it comes to opening the same app multiple times, which is very noticeable.
Some things to look out for when getting a new SSD would be the warranty (I've got a 5 year warranty from Intel, which is a more than reputeable brand), the performance (you can check Read/Write Speed benchamraks on the internet, from either Tom's Hardware, LLT or whoever you trust), the port compatibility (M.2 or SATA) and the flash memory used. The latter is a bit tricky to understand, you should do some research to fully understand it.
Another option is the Hybrid Drive, which uses some flash memory (usually 8 GBs) as a cache for a Hard Disk. It's faster than the usual HDD, but doesn't have any other advantage of an SSD.
Worth mentioning is that you could use some RAM as cache memory to "boost" your HDD performance, though I wouldn't recommend it unless you know what you're doing.

I hope this helps.

 

SDD is faster than HDD. Even the worst of SDDs tends to smoke HDDs when it comes to performance and speed. SDDs does functionally everything that a HDD can do, but in SDD data is stored on interconnected flash memory chips that can retain the data even when there is no power present. SDDs are faster than HDDs because they use semi-conductors technology. Since there is no mechanical part in SDDs therefore they can boot-up in maximum 30 seconds whereas HDDs may take up to 2-3 minutes.