Why Is Hard Drive Performance Crucial?

Every user can answer this question easily: turn your PC or notebook on, and you'll notice that most of the waiting is caused by the hard drive pushing data into the main memory while Windows or another operating system is launching. While the time needed to boot into the operating system has decreased considerably over the last few years - thanks in part to BIOS optimizations - and some systems now start in as little as 15-20 seconds, this is still the main bottleneck that prevents a really smooth computer experience.

We don't want to wait 30 or more seconds for our PCs to be ready. Nor do we want to wait 20 seconds for our favorite applications to be launched. And we should not have to accept that it can even take seconds for applications just to close!

Another important issue is backup: if it takes forever to read or write data on a hard drive, the time consumed by backup and data replication procedures will increase for even ordinary amounts of everyday data. While it was certainly possible to copy the data off an 850 MB hard drive onto another medium within few minutes, securing your audio, video and photo database will certainly take much more time today.

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