220-1101 Question 360
Single answerStorageA technician is upgrading a user's laptop that has become slow when opening large spreadsheets and launching applications. The laptop currently uses a 2.5-inch SATA hard drive. The user wants the biggest improvement in everyday performance without replacing the entire laptop. Which upgrade should the technician recommend?
- A
Replace the 2.5-inch SATA hard drive with a 2.5-inch SATA SSD
- B
Replace the 2.5-inch SATA hard drive with a 7200 RPM SATA hard drive
- C
Add an external USB 3.0 hard drive and move the user's files to it
- D
Create a second partition on the existing hard drive for applications
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
For A+ Core 1 storage scenarios, technicians should match the upgrade to the user's actual performance problem. When a system is using a traditional spinning hard disk, moving to an SSD is one of the most effective upgrades for improving everyday responsiveness. This aligns with common vendor and industry best practices: SSDs outperform HDDs significantly in access time, random I/O, and boot/application load tasks. A faster-spinning HDD is only an incremental improvement, while external storage primarily adds capacity rather than internal system performance. Partitioning changes logical organization, not physical disk speed.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Replacing a mechanical 2.5-inch SATA hard drive with a 2.5-inch SATA SSD provides a major real-world performance improvement in boot time, application launches, file access, and general responsiveness. SSDs have much lower latency and far higher IOPS than HDDs, which directly addresses the user's complaint about slowness during everyday tasks.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A 7200 RPM SATA hard drive may be somewhat faster than a slower laptop HDD, but it is still a mechanical drive with much higher seek times and lower random-access performance than an SSD. A technician might choose this option because it sounds like a speed upgrade, but it does not provide the largest practical improvement.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. An external USB 3.0 hard drive can add storage capacity, but it will not meaningfully improve the laptop's internal operating system and application performance. In many cases, running applications from an external HDD would be slower or less convenient than using an internal SSD.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Creating a second partition does not make a single physical hard drive faster. This is a common misconception. Partitions are logical divisions of the same disk and do not reduce mechanical latency or improve random read/write performance.