How To Check If A Windows 10 Hard Drive Is Rotary Or Solid State (2020)

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Lesson Summary:

This lesson can be found within my book 27 Amazing Windows 10 Performance Boosting Tips: A Complete Visual Guide For Beginners, Intermediates & Experts. The goal of this lesson is to teach the user How To Check If A Windows 10 Hard Drive Is Rotary Or Solid State in 2020, This lesson is performed using a complete visual guide. First, we will assess the primary skill one user will obtain through the lesson. Second, a brief risk analysis of how the lesson can impact system performance and security. Finally, we conclude with learning why this particular lesson is important.

Skills Obtained In This Lesson:

Why Learning How To Check If A Windows 10 Hard Drive Is Rotary Or Solid State Is Important:

WARNING! Not All Computers And Devices Can Upgrade The Hard Drive. It Is Very Common For Companies To Solder The Hard Drive Or SSD To The Motherboard. You Need To Check With The Device Manufacturer Or Google To Ensure The Old Drive Can Be Removed And Replaced. 

WARNING! This Speed Technique Is A Destructive Upgrade. This Tip Requires The User To Completely Reinstall Microsoft Windows Onto The New Hard Drive Or Utilize A 3rd Party Hard Drive Cloning / Migration Tool.

Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) vs Solid State Drives (SSDs)

Hard drive upgrades from standard rotary drives to solid-state hard drives frequently result in significant performance increases to computers. Hard drives are often confused with memory. The primary functional difference between the two is hard drives retain and store information even after the device is powered off. Random Access Memory, or RAM, on the other hand, actually frees up and releases the information once power is lost. 

The loss of information means any data stored in memory disappears every time one removes power. Not all hard drives are created equal. If you use a traditional rotary hard drive, then it is likely to be the bottleneck. Most modern computers have processing and memory power that far surpasses rotary hard drive read and write speeds.

What’s Inside A Hard Disk Drive (HDD)?

I call it a rotary hard drive because it has a motor inside of it. If you put your ear next to your hard drive and you can hear it spinning, then it is a rotary hard drive. These hard drives are incredibly reliable, as time has shown, but they aren’t the fastest. A common misconception is that if you get a faster rotary hard drive in terms of RPM, then you get faster read and write speeds. The truth of this depends on the manufacturer of the hard drive. 

Most manufacturers now advertise the read and write speeds of their hard drives. Once you’ve started to pay attention to these read and write speeds, you quickly find that solid-state drives, or SSDs, are significantly faster than their rotary hard drive counterparts. The downside is you have to pay for this performance difference. Of course, as with any piece of hardware, you can generally overspend for a few more megabytes per second reading and writing speeds. I’m usually pretty conservative about these and find a happy medium between price and performance. I’m very much a fan of Samsung’s SSDs as well. So let’s dig in and see what we can find.