SSD

How it works

• Stores data on chips with no spinning parts.
• Boots and opens files far faster than an older hard drive.
• Fails without warning, so it still needs a backup.
• Upgrading an old computer's drive is one of the cheapest speed gains.

What can go wrong (example scenario)

A four-person design studio was still on a laptop with a spinning drive that took four minutes to boot and froze opening large files. The designer worked around it for a year. A modest SSD upgrade would have paid for itself in a week of saved time.

How WILDCARD handles it

Unified Backups' Computer Backups keeps a copy of the machine so an SSD that dies without warning is an inconvenience. Specifying SSDs in new computers is the kind of work Projects handles when buying hardware.

• A dental office upgrades its three front-desk PCs from hard drives to SSDs and cuts the morning boot wait.
• A law firm specifies NVMe SSDs in new laptops for fast document searches.
• A contractor's field laptop with an SSD survives being bounced around in the truck better than one with a spinning disk.

Example scenario: A small accounting firm's partner opened his laptop one morning to a “no boot device” message. The SSD had died overnight with no warning. The machine image from the night before restored onto a new drive in an hour, and he lost nothing except the coffee that went cold.

A question owners ask

Are SSDs more reliable than hard drives?

They survive drops and vibration better and fail less often overall. When they do fail, it is sudden. Reliability is a reason to buy one; it is never a reason to skip the backup.