To those with SSDs - are SSDs beneficial to the everyday user? Would it, for example, help me at work with AutoCAD or simpler tasks? My project manager, moronic as he may be, has decided to spend company money and update both my computer and that of my coworker with SSDs (240GB) and Im not sure if its a proper use of company funds. Yea they dont cost much but Id rather properly manage the money and/or save it. What do you guys who use them think?
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TL;DR: It depends on company priorities, but at some point I would recommend having an SSD setup for employees.
Disclaimer: I love SSD’s and cannot imagine life without one now that I have several in every PC I touch every day.
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Yes they do. They substantially speed up PC boot time and load time for programs, so less waiting and more working. How effective they are depend on the kind of applications you are running. An adobe illustrator file with several internal links to photoshop designs for a new channel landing page, for example, will take a few minutes to load. I’m not sure if this example applies to AutoCAD.
Let’s say the SSD saves 10m per day. Breaking that down: 10 m = 1/6 hr x $25 /hr = $4.16 of productivity time recovered.
Let’s say you buy into Intel (~$115). That means you break even after ~one month assuming you have a company culture that supports a high enough level of productivity where those 10 m will matter.
Now amplify that by the number of employees at your workplace. Let’s say 50 people all with the same average salary of $25. You have now recovered $208 of paid productive time per day.
Would I say that this is the best use of company funds right now? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on company priorities. No amount off SSD purchasing will solve a resource problem (ie. having too much work spread over a limited number of employees), for example.
The problem with this model, is that if you build a culture of high productivity (as opposed to just high enough), then employees will find other productive things to do while their computer is loading—so that time you’ve “recovered” wasn’t lost, it was redirected.
So I guess the question you need to ask yourself is, what do people at your workplace do when they are waiting for a computer to boot / load files they need to work on.
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Ah okay. I see what you’re saying. I guess that makes sense. I dont know. My company is kind of stupid lol. We dont put priority on working smart but rather on working more if you need to (say if some project is due soon or something). Its also really small. There isnt more than 13 people in the company and it might be even less soon if my coworker decides to quit like he told me he would today. -____-. So yea I dont know. Ill take the upgrade just because it might make working where Im working just that much more bearable.
I inherited an old laptop at work which I use for a lot of cad work.
Every afternoon my machine would run out of memory and slow to a crawl when it started paging the hard drive until a few weeks ago when the hard drive just failed to boot at all. My manager replaced it with an SSD and the afternoon slow down are far more manageable.
This is a company by the way that until recently had a server room consisting of about 6 old laptops sitting in a room.
Last week they replaced 3 of the laptops with a proper rack server running 3 virtual machines.
I am so proud.
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lol interesting. I guess I look forward to at least trying out an SSD before getting one of my own.
I think SSDs are worth it! I’ve felt that my OS was a lot more responsive in terms of copying/moving files.