Give your Mac or Windows PC a performance boost by switching your old HDD for a new SSD or additional RAM upgrade or both!
SSDs can provide a significant boost to an older Mac that is still using a traditional hard drive. This is because the older mechanical hard drive has to locate the data on the platters before returning it to the computer to load.
The speed of the drive (measured in Revolutions Per Minute, or RPM) is one of the deciding factors of how quickly this happens. Hard disks have to rotate each time it needs to pick up a piece of data. and due to the mechanical nature of this, over time the drive slows down and eventually stops working. This is why SSDs are so popular in today's computers, along with their impressive speeds. SSDs work much like USB thumb drives or memory. They store the data on chips which means that the drive can retrieve data from different locations simultaneously, avoiding any wait time. So even on older computers an SSD can improve performance.
RAM can help increase overall system performance by providing more space for storing more temporary information. This can be more noticeably seen when switching between applications. If, when you swap between applications you notice a delay in the system bring the requested application to the front then this could be due to a need for more RAM.
When a computer runs out of space to store information in RAM it then resorts to saving it to the hard disk, which is generally known as virtual memory. This then in turn brings the performance of your hard drive in to the equation. The slower the drive then the slower the computer loads information out of the Virtual Memory and back in to RAM, causing the delay you see when switching between applications.
So, upgrading both the hard drive and the amount of memory you have together can really bring an ageing computer to life, especially if you like working with many applications open at any one time.
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