It's long been suggested that solid state drives represent the most important upgrade you can give a modern computer for boosting its overall performance. Today that remains true by a considerable margin, where even budget-oriented SSDs wipe the floor with the fastest 3.5" hard drives, providing users with nearly instantaneous access times compared to the 10ms-plus delay associated with faster 7200RPM HDDs.

Not only are SSDs faster than HDDs, but they also consume less power and generate less heat. Additionally, because they have no moving parts, they're quieter, more reliable and more compact than their spinning counterparts. These "bonus" attributes don't matter much to desktop users, but they're particularly advantageous to notebooks, which are increasingly outfitted with flash storage instead (or alongside) of sluggish HDDs.