What is a Solid State Drive (SSD) ?
Solid state drives transform the pace of productivity. Wait times seem inconsequential, but throughout the day they add up and limit workflow. Instead of waiting for your computer to start and load apps, you can complete tasks, serve more customers, ship more orders, and crunch more data. Do everything in your digital workday faster – and without those pesky and unnecessary delays.
Then take it a step further and imagine that not only are you able to work faster, but so is everyone else in your business. Your organization is able to move faster, serve customers better, and outpace the competition. When businesses make the migration to SSDs, they overcome the biggest time drain they didn’t know existed: mechanical hard drives.
PART 1: SSDs in desktops and laptops: the individual workspace enhancer
Empower your office team with a reported 15x the speed
Solid state drives load programs instantly; hard drives can take much longer. When employees are using their computers all day for multiple tasks, the speed SSDs provide can empower your organization to move faster. Solid state drives are reported to be over 15x faster than conventional hard drives.
Give your mobile workforce 2x the battery life
Today’s mobile workers are constantly on the go but can be constrained by limited battery life. Solid state drives are twice as energy-efficient as hard drives, which is the difference between a laptop’s battery lasting an entire flight or powering down midway through.
Protect your data with road-worthy durability
Because solid state drives don’t have small moving parts, they’re significantly more durable than hard drives, which can’t withstand as much wear and tear. This is important because mobile workers are often traveling and luggage gets tossed around. If a computer gets dropped or jostled before a major client presentation, the hard drive can fail, but the structural design of an SSD allows it to keep working.
Secure confidential customer and business data
Everything stored on business systems is vulnerable to hackers, thieves, and the competition. Hard drives typically support only software-based encryption, which can be hacked. A better way to protect sensitive data is to encrypt it at the hardware level on a solid state drive.
PART 2: SSDs in servers: the organizational enhancer
Solid state drives enhance laptop and desktop computers, but they’re even more powerful in servers. Everyone gets the benefits of faster application loading, faster database access, and faster online transaction processing.
Enable all employees to quickly access data
Everyone needs access to files that live on servers. However, when too many employees are trying to simultaneously access data, it can stretch hard drives beyond their limits. When hard drives are replaced with solid state drives, everyone in the organization can quickly access what they need to get things done.
Increase the number of virtual machines
When virtual machines, virtualized applications, and operating systems are stored on enterprise SSDs, the systems perform significantly faster. Solid state drives also help minimize boot storms while increasing the numbers of virtual machines you can run.
Process 45x more database transactions per minute
Enterprise-grade solid state drives make it possible to process 2.5 million database transactions per minute and over 500,000 orders per minute on Microsoft® SQL Server® 2014. Compare that to a test of enterprise-grade hard drives, which were able to process only 53,220 database transactions per minute.
Save on software licenses
By improving the performance of existing servers, you can use fewer servers, which means savings on annual database software licenses that often cost more than 25x the cost of the server per year.5 Solid state drives can cut license costs, and because they’re more energy-efficient, SSDs reduce the need for cooling, which can result in additional savings.