You really should own an SSD

Solid State Drive’s (SSD) are now affordable and mainstream.  There is really no excuse for not using one.  This is the single biggest area where a small investment will make a huge difference in your computing experience.  Bang for buck, the SSD provides the largest increase to your computer’s speed and your productivity.

An SSD is exponentially faster than a mechanical drive.  No matter how fast your CPU and backplane are, you will always see performance bottlenecked by the limitations of hard drives that require mechanical action to perform their search, read and write functions.  Because of this, your system’s apparent speed is directly scalable in relation to the speed of the drive on which the operating system is installed.

We recommend buying and installing at least a 250gb SSD as your OS drive.  You can clone your full system drive, including OS and applications over from your mechanical drive to the SSD with typically included software, or you can do a fresh install of the OS and applications.

This also happens to be a really good time to implement a better filing system since you are starting fresh and actually have two separate hard drives inside your new computer.

Typically windows creates directories like “my pictures” “my videos” “my documents”, etc. under the user profile on the hard drive that it is installed on.  In this case that would be on the SSD by default.  There are two major problems with this: 1.) Although the SSD is exponentially faster, the technology is more expensive so the drive has a much smaller storage capacity. The storage capacity of the less expensive SSD’s is ideal to fit windows and all of your installed applications, but could easily be overloaded by your other files and data.  2.)  If you ever want/need to do a clean reinstall windows, since that destroys all the data on the OS drive, you would have to copy all of the files in these default “my [whatever]” directories off the OS drive, reinstall windows and then find and copy all of the files back into the new default directories in the freshly reinstalled Windows.

A much better way would be to keep all of your photos, videos, documents, music, etc. on a separate inexpensive, large capacity mechanical hard drive, instead of placing them on the SSD where windows is installed.  This way if your windows ever stops running smoothly, gets a virus or has some problem that would necessitate reinstallation of windows, you will not have to do anything with all of your personal files and documents.  You just reinstall windows on the SSD, and all of your personal files and documents remain unaffected for as long as that hard drive lives, since they were on a completely separate physical drive from Windows.  We highly recommend doing this as it makes life soooo much easier when the inevitable problem arises.  It is also a little more secure and can possibly provide some protection from data loss due to viruses or malicious activity.

To set this up you will just need to create a new folder on the secondary mechanical hard drive that will be used as the root of your new filing system.  For instance, create a folder called “Joe’s Files”, inside of that folder create a bunch of new folders named things like “Photos” “Music” “Finances” “Medical” “Work”, etc.  All you are doing is abandoning the default location of your filing system in windows and setting it up in a new and separate location on the mechanical drive. An analogy would be moving your personal files to a separate filing cabinet from your business file cabinet.  If the IRS comes and confiscates your business file cabinet (Windows breaks down), at least you don’t lose your personal files.

You will also probably want to tell windows to use your new folders as its corresponding default locations, so that when you click on shortcuts/libraries like “my pictures” you will see the contents of your folder where you are now storing your pictures instead of the old default location in windows.  This is done by right clicking on each of the quick launch buttons or libraries on the left column of windows file explorer and selecting “Properties”, then “Location” tab, then “Move…”  From the browser window select the new folders you created on the mechanical hard drive as the target.  Now the default locations will be on the mechanical drive instead of the windows SSD.   You can now do a full clean reinstall of windows without even touching your personal files and documents.