Guide Computer Hardware Data Storage - Hard Drives / Solid State Drives (SSD) / Flash Memory SSD's - Actual Performance Difference Updated August 18 2024
In the video below, I am showing an actual customer laptop that was running very slowly. I log in to a different account so no personal data is shown. This is not a fast laptop, it doesn't support Windows 11. It does show the relative difference a SSD can make
The laptop is a Dell Latitude 3550, it has an i3-5005u CPU, 4GB DDR3 memory, 500GB Toshiba hard drive.

The video shows 3 different configurations.
1: Original configuration from the factory.

2: Upgraded memory to 8GB, original hard drive.

3: Upgraded memory to 8GB, a new 480GB Samsung SATA SSD installed.

To perform this test:
Fast startup was disabled
Windows updates were installed for August 2024, and then paused so it should not check for them for 7 days.
The laptop was set to not go to sleep and the display was set to not turn off.
The laptop was plugged into power throughout the test.
I cloned the hard drive over to the SSD but left the original hard drive in place.
I then rebooted the laptop once more and shut it down. The next power on was the video on the left.
On each laptop, I had set Chrome and LibreOffice to start up automatically. Once they loaded, I opened Task Manager to the Performance tab, and waited until the hard drive was below 25% usage (indicating everything is fully loaded and it's responding about as fast as it can), I then shut down the laptop.

After recording the first video, I replaced the 4GB with 8GB of memory, and then recorded the video in the middle.
I then replaced the hard drive with the one I had cloned earlier, let it boot and detect the SSD, shut it down, and then recorded the video on the right.

The final times that each video took:
3:53 - 4GB + 500GB Toshiba Hard Drive
3:13 - 8GB + 500GB Toshiba Hard Drive
1:35 - 8GB + 480GB Samsung SATA SSD






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