LEGAL CENTS: Going for a relaxing drive

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In the season premiere of television’s best show, “Breaking Bad,” Walt and Jesse destroy evidence of their criminal activity by demagnetizing the hard drive on a computer seized by the police.

The two drive a truck, which has a huge magnet hidden within, past the police evidence storage building.

If only the computer’s owner had used a solid state drive instead of a traditional hard drive. Then DEA agent Hank finally might get the goods on his meth-cooking brother-in-law, Walt.

Walt’s magnet would’ve been useless because solid state drives are more resilient than hard drives. SSDs use flash memory, sort of like a thumb drive, instead of moving parts and magnetic discs.

There are other benefits to swapping out an old computer’s hard drive with an SSD. Namely, it will make the computer run much faster, quieter and cooler. It also weighs less and uses less power.

Note that I suggested it for an old computer. It can add new life to a machine that might be on its last legs. Many new “ultrabook” models use SSDs rather than traditional hard drives, and they might be worth checking out.

It worked for Madison lawyer Keith Wessel.

A few months ago, he bought a Crucial RealSSD C300 for between $130 and $180 from Newegg for his old home desktop. He wanted to try it for editing photographs.

Wessel moonlights as a professional photographer and editing photos was painfully slow before the SSD because he works with very large images. He also received “error” messages with annoying frequency.

It would be very expensive to save the images on an SSD, he said. One way standard hard drives still have an edge over SSDs is cheap storage. To get around that, Wessel simply saves the edited images to a hard drive.

“The great thing is: When you boot up your computer, while it’s not instantaneous, it sure is fast,” he said.

Wessel bought it to get a taste of the future. He’s planning on buying a new PC with an SSD for his practice. He’ll then give his present computer to his law partner, but first, he plans on equipping it with an SSD.

“For email, word processing and Web searching, a lawyer will see a large boost in performance, either by spending $2,000 on a new computer, or less than $200 on a [solid state] disc drive,” Wessel said. “It should last him for quite a while, and he’ll be very happy with the performance increase.”

Wessel’s goal is not so much to increase efficiency and, by extension, increase billings. That probably will happen, but not on a large scale.

Rather, the reason to buy an SSD is to make work easier. If a new computer is out of the question, Wessel said, it’s a no-brainer to improve what already is in the office.

“It’s less than $200,” he said. “If you’re wasting 10 minutes every morning waiting for your computer to boot up, and you bill at $200 per hour, do the math.

“That’s how quickly it will pay for itself.”