Solid State Drives for Laptops

What Is It?

A solid state drive (SSD) is made entirely of flash memory housed inside a hard drive sized case.  It's designed to replace the laptop's C: drive.  Booting up the computer or opening applications take half the time with the fastest models.  Unfortunately, writing to the SSD is slower than using a traditional, mechanical hard drive.  Installing software and copying hundreds of small files can take twice as long.  People have noted the overall speed increase is amazing with the exception of browsing the web.  Web browsers sputter when they write dozens of tiny files to the drive for each web page.  Look for this to improve in the future.