Switch your computers to SSDs and save your business thousands

Hi all,

In Australia, another financial year has finished, so hopefully, the bean counters can all take a well-earned rest for a bit and stop harassing us about invoices for a couple of weeks!

As part of our end-of-financial year process, we take audits of all IT equipment across our fleet and also that of our client bases. One thing that stands out is end-user devices (laptops and desktops) out of warranty. In some cases, the computers are old (more than 4 years) and should be replaced, but in many cases, these workstations have some life left in them but are probably hindering staff productivity due to lack of resources. 

For devices like these, a small financial outlay to increase the memory, or replace the traditional disk with an SSD is going to provide a return on investment within a very short space of time – see the example below of how much it can save:

• Waiting for the computer to start in the morning – 5 mins/day
• Waiting for applications to load and files to save – 15 mins/day
• Processing delays due to limitations of resources – 5 mins/day

This all adds up! 20 minutes a day works out to around 86 hours per year just waiting for your computer. For a staff member earning $80,000, their hourly rate is approximately $30. That’s over $2,500/year – just in waiting! For an outlay of less than $500, you can save even 50% of that time, it makes sense to upgrade these machines!

We’ve recently replaced quite a few device fleets on a budget by replacing the traditional disk with SSDs and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive in every single case.

I know the subject of SSDs has been raised before, but they really are the single best item to upgrade in a workstation or laptop to drastically improve performance and reduce your IT Support bills.

If you use something like Dropbox Business Smart Sync, then your SSD doesn't need to be as big as the existing drive because only the data you use locally, needs to be local.

If you would like a specific audit to be carried out on your fleet of workstations to highlight those that could be upgraded, please get in touch.

Thanks and regards,