Should I upgrade to an SSD?

In short, yes. Swapping your old spinning HDD is the single biggest most effective upgrade you can make to your computer or laptop. There are plenty of upgrades that may be beneficial but in 99% of cases, none of them would be as significant as moving to an SSD. We're so steadfast on that, that unless there is a specific need for it (SSDs are not perfect for all applications) when they fail, we replace all HDDs with SSDs as a matter of course. Buy why I hear you ask?

HDD stands for hard disk drive. Imagine an old record player with the record spinning around and the needle moving across the vinyl to play the music. Only this time it's reading data. That's exactly what an HDD looks like inside. The trouble is that data isn't linear like music so quite often the needle has to move around the disk to find what it's looking for. That takes time and that's means you have to sit there, waiting, wondering if your computers jammed or not. You may have heard the term "defrag" or "defragmentation". This is where you put the data is some kind of semblance of order so the needle doesn't have to spend so long finding things. Consequently, that makes your computer a little quicker. Now I know what you're thinking; that sounds a bit fragile doesn't it?. Well it is. Going back to the record player analogy, it's perfectly possible to make the needle jump, scratch the disk and if you're really unlucky, get it dirty

SSDs are a different breed altogether. They are solid state drives. As the name suggests they are solid, just like a USB flash drive or an SD card you put in your phone or camera. There's no needle, no spinning disk, in fact no moving parts whatsoever. That means not only are they much more durable but they are much faster. And when I say much faster, I mean much faster! They use less energy and produce less heat too. There is no needle searching for files so everything is found almost instantly. No need for any kind of defragmentation either, it's all just there.

Only a few years ago SSDs were expensive and could be somewhat unreliable. Prices these days have come down nicely though. A small, second hand SSD can be had for as little as £25. Plenty if you just want to browse the web and do some work e-mails. Even something more substantial at 500GB is around £50, used. Claims that after a certain number of read/writes it will pack up without warning are actually true, but everything has a lifespan and the technology has moved along so far that they will now often last longer than the HDDs they're replacing

There are still some circumstances where an HDD is the best bet, but not many. HDDs are cheaper when you get up to the big sizes. If you're looking for an 8TB drive to use to back things up, an HDD would the one to go for. But that's overkill for your average home user who is just using their computer or laptop for average home user things.

For the vast majority of us, HDDs are now totally obsolete