When it comes to upgrades, CPUs get all the attention, but odds are that turning your boot drive into an SSD will do more for your everyday performance. We show you how to do it right.

If you want to use a pre-used SSD for your computer, you need to first make its drive format type the same as that of the existing hard drive, prior to the cloning process.

If you just built a PC, or added a brand new hard drive or SSD to an existing computer, you have to format it before you can actually store data on it. This is called 'initializing' the drive.

You just need to know certain things, and you need to make certain decisions. What you need to know about using an external SSD on a Mac as a boot drive External drives may be slower ...