Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

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sirch345
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Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by sirch345 »

After upgrading to W10 (I took advantage of the free upgrade offer) from W8.1, I'm toying with the idea of fitting a SSD (solid state drive) hard drive for the O/S only on my desktop pc.

Are there any other advantages of doing this besides faster boot and shut down times?

Any advice would be very helpful,

Chris.
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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by hallie »

SSD is less likely to crash due to the fact there are no moving parts :thumbup:
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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by Wicky »

I dipped my toe in (sorry Mac ;) when SSD prices dropped low enough for a decent capacity. It gives a massive speed boost on my MacPro desktop. My fusion drive set up uses a 500GB Crucial SSD as the boot drive for the OS and applcations while data is stored on a 2GB hybrid drive. Booting up takes a matter of a few seconds, applications load super quick. Highly recommended.
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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by VTRDark »

SSD's are like expensive batteries, by that what I mean is they have a limited amount of times that they can be written too like a rechargeable battery has a limit to how many cycles it can go through.

They are also not as secure which is one reason why they are being so highly promoted. Government authorities would love us all to have them, but what is good for them is also good for the criminals...err is there a difference.
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So there are pro's and cons. I would consider going down the SSHD (hybrid drive) route. It wont be as fast but it gives you more storage space and the controller decides where to prioritise speed too the SSD side of thing's, which will most likely be the running of the OS and launching applications rather than data storage. They are loads cheaper and don't wear quite to the same degree as SSD where more data is being written over and over again. It's a bit of a myth that SSD's don't wear and there is more to go wrong inside the chips. The one big bonus apart from speed with them is that they don't generate so much heat unlike mechanical drives which is where the real killer is.

IMO I think the SSD industry has some way to go yet. It's still early days so wait until the tech moves along a bit and prices drop somewhat more. When one can buy a 1TB SSD for the Price of a 1TB mechanical drive then things may be different.

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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by Virt »

cybercarl wrote:SSD's are like expensive batteries, by that what I mean is they have a limited amount of times that they can be written too like a rechargeable battery has a limit to how many cycles it can go through.
There was a test done recently, modern SSD's can survive into the billions of read/write operations. This really shouldn't be a factor in choosing what device you want to use.
cybercarl wrote: They are also not as secure which is one reason why they are being so highly promoted. Government authorities would love us all to have them, but what is good for them is also good for the criminals...err is there a difference.
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Nothing is secure, the only way to make a system secure is to seal it in adamantium and don't connect it to the internet. I'm pretty sure if you wanted to you could still DBAN an SSD and write everything to 0's. In order for them to access data on your SSD though something has gone severely wrong as they have either physical access to your hardware or are exploiting a security weakness in software you're using. You can't blame that on the SSD.
cybercarl wrote: So there are pro's and cons. I would consider going down the SSHD (hybrid drive) route. It wont be as fast but it gives you more storage space and the controller decides where to prioritise speed too the SSD side of thing's, which will most likely be the running of the OS and launching applications rather than data storage. They are loads cheaper and don't wear quite to the same degree as SSD where more data is being written over and over again. It's a bit of a myth that SSD's don't wear and there is more to go wrong inside the chips. The one big bonus apart from speed with them is that they don't generate so much heat unlike mechanical drives which is where the real killer is.
Once again I disagree (sorry!). Hybrid SSD's are one of the biggest farces I've seen, the amount of SSD space they have is utterly tiny and it will almost never be used for what you want it to be used for as it's most likely it will stick a few OS files on there and not much else. It also really doesn't provide anywhere near the same level of performance boost.


Anyway, my thoughts.

Go for an SSD, I've been using one in my gaming PC since I built it ~18 months ago. It's constantly being written to when I uninstall one game to stick another on it (as I only have 120GB, most of my games are stored on a HDD but I like to have one big game at a time on the SSD). It gets probably a new game every 2-3 weeks (which also includes uninstalling the previous one), it's not provided me any issues and when I boot up the PC I'm at the login screen within about 6-7 seconds. Couldn't recommend SSD's enough, I'm using one of the cheap Kingston ones that's a couple of years old and can't even hold a candle to newer ones (the latest generation of Samsung's are just insanely good).
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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by Miztaziggy »

Simple answer SSDs will be the biggest and best upgrade you can do to your PC.

I did mine a few years ago. Still running the same 480gb drive now, 0 issues.

I've recently upgraded my work laptop and went for an i7 with SSD. The difference between this and my old laptop is immense.

It's not just the boot and shutdown either.

It's all your apps. I used to boot and then try to open outlook. It would take 20 to 40 seconds as the HDD was busy loading the OS.

Now it's almost instant. I boot, click outlook, and it's on screen within 3 seconds, no pausing, hanging, waiting.

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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by Miztaziggy »

BTW, I'm using a Kingston Hyper X Pro. But any drive will be worth it. My brother just upgraded to a 500gb Sony EVO 850 and that's blazing fast too, also quite cheap now.

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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by Virt »

Miztaziggy wrote:BTW, I'm using a Kingston Hyper X Pro. But any drive will be worth it. My brother just upgraded to a 500gb Sony EVO 850 and that's blazing fast too, also quite cheap now.

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The 850 also comes with a 5 year warranty which is just ridiculously good and shows how confident they are about their hardware. If you are worried about read/write operations on an SSD that should clear your mind entirely
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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by MacV2 »

Virt wrote:
cybercarl wrote:SSD's are like expensive batteries, by that what I mean is they have a limited amount of times that they can be written too like a rechargeable battery has a limit to how many cycles it can go through.
There was a test done recently, modern SSD's can survive into the billions of read/write operations. This really shouldn't be a factor in choosing what device you want to use.
cybercarl wrote: They are also not as secure which is one reason why they are being so highly promoted. Government authorities would love us all to have them, but what is good for them is also good for the criminals...err is there a difference.
https://security.stackexchange.com/ques ... -recovered

[youtube][/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SSSMi4X_mA
Nothing is secure, the only way to make a system secure is to seal it in adamantium and don't connect it to the internet. I'm pretty sure if you wanted to you could still DBAN an SSD and write everything to 0's. In order for them to access data on your SSD though something has gone severely wrong as they have either physical access to your hardware or are exploiting a security weakness in software you're using. You can't blame that on the SSD.
cybercarl wrote: So there are pro's and cons. I would consider going down the SSHD (hybrid drive) route. It wont be as fast but it gives you more storage space and the controller decides where to prioritise speed too the SSD side of thing's, which will most likely be the running of the OS and launching applications rather than data storage. They are loads cheaper and don't wear quite to the same degree as SSD where more data is being written over and over again. It's a bit of a myth that SSD's don't wear and there is more to go wrong inside the chips. The one big bonus apart from speed with them is that they don't generate so much heat unlike mechanical drives which is where the real killer is.
Once again I disagree (sorry!). Hybrid SSD's are one of the biggest farces I've seen, the amount of SSD space they have is utterly tiny and it will almost never be used for what you want it to be used for as it's most likely it will stick a few OS files on there and not much else. It also really doesn't provide anywhere near the same level of performance boost.


Anyway, my thoughts.

Go for an SSD, I've been using one in my gaming PC since I built it ~18 months ago. It's constantly being written to when I uninstall one game to stick another on it (as I only have 120GB, most of my games are stored on a HDD but I like to have one big game at a time on the SSD). It gets probably a new game every 2-3 weeks (which also includes uninstalling the previous one), it's not provided me any issues and when I boot up the PC I'm at the login screen within about 6-7 seconds. Couldn't recommend SSD's enough, I'm using one of the cheap Kingston ones that's a couple of years old and can't even hold a candle to newer ones (the latest generation of Samsung's are just insanely good).
Virt, the balls on my abacus are sticking & not sliding along corectly, what do you recomend to speed things up ?

Will an SSD help me :confused
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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by Virt »

MacV2 wrote:
Virt, the balls on my abacus are sticking & not sliding along corectly, what do you recomend to speed things up ?

Will an SSD help me :confused
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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by AMCQ46 »

why do you think Virt has good skills with sticky balls?............ is it based on his time with Lloydie?
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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by sirch345 »

Many thanks Hallie, Wicky, Cybercarl, YMVirt and Miztaziggy for the help and advice, a great response guys :clap: :clap:

Funnily enough I had been looking at the Samsung 850 EVO, that seems to have excellent reviews.The Samsung 850 Pro however had problems with it's firmware update around 12mths ago, although most likely sorted by now.
I was going for the 120GB SSD, but for £15 more I can get a 250GB version, so it makes sense to me to go for the bigger one, although strangely enough they are discontinuing the 250GB 850 EVO version.

A good point Virt about the 5yrs warranty, although reading some reviews on Amazon a warranty claim seems to take sometime.

Now should I be doing a clean install of W10, or a clone of my recent free W10 upgrade for the new SSD HD?

Chris.
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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by KermitLeFrog »

Always do a clean install if you can. The only problems I've seen have been upgrades.
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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by turbo_billy »

MacV2 wrote:
Virt, the balls on my abacus are sticking & not sliding along corectly, what do you recomend to speed things up ?

Will an SSD help me :confused
I want to know what are you doing sticking your balls on the abacus in the first place........ 8O
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Re: Anybody upgraded to a SSD hard drive?

Post by MacV2 »

Virt wrote:
MacV2 wrote:
Virt, the balls on my abacus are sticking & not sliding along corectly, what do you recomend to speed things up ?

Will an SSD help me :confused
The only thing that can help you is a psychiatrist.
Thats the sort of answer I like...


Can you PM me the phone number of the one you use please... :wink:
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