Don’t you always want things faster? Especially when performing a task like a photo or video shoot where everyone is watching, right? We have come to expect everything immediately because so much more is being asked of us every day. Technology has helped us but it has also complicated our lives, and the one thing it has created is the cult of the device! We cannot live without the tool that make us able to handle all those tasks.
So I can only imagine you are like me, when you hear of a new device you want it; not just because it’s new a shinny, but also because there is a perceived benefit to your life. Those benefits are sometimes new features, but they are often just power and speed. Power and speed help you accomplish all those tasks faster so you can have that personal life you also wanted, right. So how do you get power and speed with out buying a new computer? By replacing the startup drive with an SSD drive, and by using SSD drive for file transfer.
Here is a little background. A normal Hard Drive has spinning platters that have magnetic readers reading sections of the disk while the disk spins. While these drives are a great deal of bang for the buck (they are cheap for a great deal of space) reading a hard drive that way is relatively slow. An SSD drive on the other hand is like having a great deal of available RAM, on a drive. All the information is read electronically, so the act of finding and recording data happens at the speed of an electron, rather at the speed of a spinning platter.
SSD drives are more expensive than a standard Hard Drive for less space, so to get the best benefit with them, you need to know where to use them. As a photographer or filmmaker shooting to a computer, the start up drive (main computer hard drive) should be an SSD drive. This will do several things for you:
1) It will speed up the startup time of your computer significantly.
2) It will also help applications like Lightroom, Photoshop and Premiere run faster, much faster in fact!
3) It will increase the file transfer speeds significantly; making backup copies of files or off loading them from your computer will be a fraction of the time.
The second place SSDs will help speed things up for you is by using them as your transfer or back drives. I buy Sandisk 500 gig Extreme Pro SSD and put them in Lightingbolt Enclosures. I will actually buy a Lecie (please check spelling) Lightningbolt drives and pull pout the standard Hard Drive and replace it with the Sandisk Extreme Pro drive. Now when you have to copy or transfer files you are doing it SSD to SSD and have extra time for that beer or Martini after the shoot!
SSD is the only way to go for these uses for your busy life!