# Benefits of Using a Solid State Drive ==The most common bottleneck of most PCs I've encountered is, in fact, IO (which when you think about it is expected for regular users)==. This bottleneck is most commonly noticed during boot because this is when the whole OS needs to be loaded and bootstrapped. And it only starts there, application load times are greatly reduced as well as almost no one pays attention nowadays to the size of app binaries. ==I would definitely recommend against buying a laptop with a regular hard drive.== ## Wear and Tear Fears are Misplaced ==Some people are afraid that using solid state drives for OS partitions will damage the drive due to excessive disk access. Those fears are misplaced because an SSD is sensitive to excessive writes and not reads==, and even that sensitivity has been largely mitigated by firmware. You may think you’re writing to the same sector over and over, but the SSD firmware 'rotates' sectors to reduce wear. You only write to the same sector again after overwriting the rest of the disk. With this mitigation in mind, you can have a reasonable expectation that the SSD won't die before other components.