This is the biggest reason to go for an SSD; they’re much, much faster than conventional hard drives in two different ways. First of all, because there are no
moving parts there is no wait. While the drive spins up or for a head to move to the correct place to start reading the data there is very little waiting time, or latency. Since data can be read from anywhere in the drive pretty much instantly, tasks which rely on lots of data being read from all over the place (such as loading the operating system when you start your computer, starting an application or loading a game) are completed much, much faster. How much faster? Well, when comparing identical machines running identical installations, it’s not uncommon for the computer with an SSD to start up in less than half the time of the computer with a conventional magnetic drive. This has the added benefit that you never have to defragment your files, which is always a nice perk. As well as outperforming HDDs in random reads, SSDs also have the upper hand in sustained reading and writing (which is when you’re reading and writing large files like videos, for example). A typical new magnetic hard drive will be able to read at
60-80 MB/s, whereas a midrange solid-state drive will be able to read at anywhere
from 175-250 MB/s.