SSD vs HDD Boot Time

These days it’s all about speed, everything needs to happen faster and go faster. We can’t wait for 3-5 shipping from Amazon anymore, we need same-day or 1-day shipping. For those who don’t like to wait for their computers to boot up, SSDs are the way to go. Quicker than it takes to get over a brain freeze your computer could be booted up and ready for you to login.

The test computer is a early 2011 Apple MacBook Pro running a Intel Core i7 at 2.3GHz, 8GB of RAM, and 1GB AMD Radeon graphics card. The test computer kept everything the same and just swapped out hard drives.

SSDs have a major advantage over HDDs for reading and writing data, which enables computers to boot off of an SSD a lot quicker than waiting for disks to spin up and access on a traditional drive.

The drive that we are testing here is a Other World Computing Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G drive that has 480GB of storage and is made for daily use that will stand up to writing and reading data all day.

In a side by side comparison, the SSD smokes a HDD with more than a minute to spare as it starts up. While not only faster at bootup you’ll find that launching applications will be much snappier not only the Mac but Windows too.