What's holding back PC performance? Hard drives! The biggest bottleneck inside a desktop or laptop is the time it takes to read and write data to and from a disk. A solid state drive (SSD) with no moving parts is much faster, as MacBook Air owners will attest.

But why stop there? A Samsung marketing firm's IT guy linked 24 solid-state drives together as a RAID array, to see how much it would boost the performance of a standard PC. In the video below, the test unit opens all Microsoft Office apps in just half a second. Defragging the array takes only three seconds.

The best news is that SSD prices are starting to come down to the point where an SSD is a reasonable upgrade. Amazon sells a 128 gigabyte model for just over $300. The speedy Samsung model used in the video, though, still costs close to a thousand dollars.