My question is, the first time you saw the speed and reality of an Solid state drive (SSD), instead of a regular hard rive, what was your reaction like?
How has it changed your life?
Can you ever go back to a normal harddrive operating system?
Do you think everyone needs it? People need to know about it right?
Restarting with a ssd takes 10 seconds from start to finish? No way it's gotta be more like 30 at least? right? right?
Jesus my next laptop or PC is going to have the best ssd..
my new laptop starts up to login screen at about 5-8 seconds and its a m.2 mydigitalssd super boot ssd
Built a pc for my old man. Difference in boot times was huge. His old pc use to take 2 to 3 minutes to boot before now take 7 to 8 seconds.
@xoom:
What about after it finishes it's honeymoon period and stuff starts to get clogged up? Does it still hold against the test of time? This is my real question because I hammer my PC like an arms warrior versus a protection paladin and pretty much make it my bitch until it dies (yeah…) Rest in peace my old laptop.. it was only 2-3 years old..But I ran that sucker like it's life depended on it
What size capacity?
my old mans pc is still booting up around same time. I'm like you however I run things to the ground so only time will tell how long this ssd survives for.
My desktop PC is 8 years old now (i7 2600k, 16gb ram and a crucial M4 128gb, - purchased for $218). The computer still starts up in 5-8 seconds.
Wife's Macbook Pro 13" 2012 took 60 seconds to start up, swapped out the HDD to a cheap sandisk 128gb SSD. Now starts up in 8 seconds as well. It's like buying a new computer.
@hypie: wow is sandy bridge really 8 years old now?
Damn feels like yesterday i was reading about it and it's new awesome architecture upgrades and improvements
Sandy Bridge was commercially available in 2012
2011, I built a gaming rig with a 2500k in mid-2011
@AlienC: >Does it still hold against the test of time?
Short answer, yes, it does. At least A LOT better than an HDD does.
Fair enough, 5 years then… Feels like it was longer than that. That being said, still happy with a $1000 build barely depreciating over 5 years.
What about after it finishes it's honeymoon period and stuff starts to get clogged up? Does it still hold against the test of time?
After the honeymoon period for an SSD… it slows down from 8 second boot to 10 second boot
No way it's gotta be more like 30 at least? right? right?
I've noticed that you need compatible PC parts for super fast bootups (<10s). If the mobo is incompatible then it will take longer. Having the right BIOS settings help too.
Laptops are all preconfigured which is why most of them with SSDs can boot up extremely quickly.
What about after it finishes it's honeymoon period and stuff starts to get clogged up? Does it still hold against the test of time? This is my real question because I hammer my PC like an arms warrior versus a protection paladin and pretty much make it my bitch until it dies (yeah…) Rest in peace my old laptop.. it was only 2-3 years old..But I ran that sucker like it's life depended on it
Just tested mine: i7 2600k, 16gb ram, and a OCZ-ARC100 SSD - it's been about 12months+ since I last reformatted to Win10
From hitting the restart button, to being back to the login prompt took just under 25seconds. More than half of that was waiting for the restart.
You don't count the time the BIOS takes to startup as that will happen regardless of the type of hard drive. And of course, newer systems have very short BIOS startup times.
My 10 year old Inspiron Core Duo (not Core 2) boots Ubuntu in 14s with a second gen very average Kingston SSDNow 64Gb. Still going strong
When I first started using SSD,my natural reaction after hitting the "start" button for my laptop was to reach for my phone…but it was too quick for me to even unlock my phone..
I've barely noticed a change in speed over the past 3 years with my 840 Evo. Any SSD these days is fast enough that you'll barely notice a drop in responsiveness/perceived speed with a few programs opening. I have maybe 15-20 programs on startup and the computer is still usable within 15 seconds of turning on. The CPU is often the bottleneck.
Night and day. Probably the most noticeable, single upgrade you can make.
Yes, and no.
Had a friend who had a 2nd-gen Core i5 desktop (8GB) with a cheap SSD, and it was sluggish as hell.
Got to backup everything off to a external drive.
Cleaned out his tower with air.
Formatted his SSD, and re-installed Windows 7 from scratch.
Then installed all the proper drivers and the updates.
Unloaded his files (photos, music, documents) back on the PC.
Kept all his movies/videos and games on the HDD.
His computer went from a 3 minute cold boot, followed by a 3 minute loading of everything on Windows.
To literally starting in 45 seconds, with about 15 seconds for all the other stuff/apps to load up on Windows.
General performance was greatly increased. Most noticeable when browsing and opening lots of tabs.
I think all the little things added up.
So a SSD makes a big difference, but people often forget to keep the PC less cluttered and with the correct drivers/optimisations.
I also recommended he upgrade his graphics from Intel's Iris to a Nvidia/AMD that needs only PCIe slot, not sure if he ever did it.
Ah yes the Windows (tm) fix. If a reboot doesn't fix it just reinstall everything. I could probably go on an endless rant but if Windows came with all the common sense things without requiring 3rd party software maybe people would stop installing stupid shit. The again it would probably require 200gb storage. Sigh.
Agree with you there.
1 major plus for linux…. everythings works and works the way other major operating systems should be like.
@Hotkolbas: except for things like wifi, graphics cards, audio, drivers, program bloat and inconsistent experiences. Apart from that yeah Linux is great.
@gromit: you must be doing something wrong.
With all my computers i have never had a driver issue.
1 feature i really like is the ability to turn the graphics card on or off manually with a toggle button on my gaming laptop…. the windows boot can not do that at all, i use this feature when im out and about and it dose improve battery life when you just need to do the basics.
@Hotkolbas: that is not a Linux feature, it is a graphics driver feature and is available regardless of OS for many of the machines with discrete + onboard as long as you have correct drivers. If you have never had driver trouble in Linux you really have not used Linux much, I have been using it since the 90's and while it is much better than it used to be it is still no where up to the standard or windows or Apple and that is simply because manufacturers don't spend the time writing drivers for such a small audience.
Well i dabbled with linux back in the mandriva days but not alot.
A lot of my past computers had onboard graphics bar my gaming rig which back then you wouldnt think of running because there where no games unless you used wine or vm.
In the last 5 years i really got stuck into linux and out of 7 computers at my home only 3 run windows, and the rest run dedicated linux distro.
Also i have never been able to turn on and off a graphics card off the bat in windows without any mods to the software.
@Hotkolbas: if simply depends on the chipset and laptop. usually NVidia it is done through the Nvidia control panel. not sure on AMD but should be with the driver pack their too. this has been available in windows since at least win 7.
Really depends on what you are doing on your machine. yes it makes reboots lightning fast but for most people that is a tiny fraction of the time spent on a computer. for many they browse the web, or edit documents and watch videos, for them an SSD offers bugger all of an upgrade. Even gamers it mostly only improves load time at the start as most games are optimised for the lowest common denominator.
^ This.
The real improvement that I thoroughly enjoy is load times for Windows and OSX on my hackintosh; as well as load times for Photoshop, Lightroom & games. Ultimately my PS/LR work is saved on a mechanical HDD, so the read and write speed benefit doesnt come in.
If you use an SSD for video editing you would be then taking advantage of the write speed as well.
Otherwise for web/media consumption/documents an SSD doesnt make any difference to me.
HHDs should only be used as backup drives for storing large amounts of data, how anyone could not be running an SSD as their main drive is beyond me.
Not keeping in touch with PC developments could be one reason. Hopefully a good value SSD will pop up on Ozbargain soon.
I've been tempted for years but never took the plunge. The prices have been falling so steadily that I'm constantly patting myself on the back for not having bought one at the previous price. Today I could get better performance and capacity for far less money than a year ago, or two years ago, when people were already saying 'you must buy this'.
Well, I don't think my quality of life would be improved enough to justify the premium of buying now rather than a bit later. There's an opportunity cost here. If I buy a cheap SSD now, I won't buy a cheaper, better SSD 3 months form now. Every time I don't buy an SSD it feels like winning. Ideally this trend will continue and I'll die before I buy an SSD.
Pls buy one now. I bought when they were 64gb at premium cost. I'll happily pay premium again. And yes it improves quality of life while you're using the computer :)
Dont have a ssd and not planning to upgrqde any of my computers with ssds.
The cons outweight the pros for me.
I totally agree with you man. I don't want to pay for a ~500GB SSD, I can't be bothered having two internal drives, having less than 500GB means I have to juggle files. I don't mind waiting more than 30sec for things to happen. Next Disk purchase will be an SSHD like this https://www.pccasegear.com/products/32725/western-digital-wd…
OK, what to do if I have a Toshiba L500 laptop? How can I add this SSD if I have a HDD?
I will look it up on youtube and see what bounce.
Sweet
That closed mindedness doesn't surprise me from someone on here, if you actually knew what you were talking about you would know that not everyone needs to have an SSD as part of the computer system.
Someone with a budget PC that only uses it once in a while for browsing the internet or sending emails doesn't need an ssd for a main drive. Why budget for 2 storage drives in a pc that's already minimal cost, there's no point when a decent mechanical drive will suit all the needs perfectly.
If you had the choice and means of putting an SSD into every PC that would be great, but it's not practical and you should think before making blanket statements like that.
Yo! Is it better to have 2x SSD then? Is the main drive for SSD like Windows 7 and the all programs? So you would use HDD for movies and music files?
Is this correct? I think my HDD is almost worn out.
I use SSD for my operating system and programs with a couple games I play also. Movies/music/tv shows etc all on separate hard drive.
"Better" really depends on what you're doing, you don't need a second ssd to store media files on but if you got the cash to spend and you want to, why not. HDD will handle movies and shows fine, even 1080p easily so I'd suggest capacity over speed for storage like that
Now I now why because most people have PC and more slots space. I have a toshiba L500, 500gb HDD, 4gb RAM, laptop and it look like I can only put one SSD. If that's the case I have to buy an SSD with at least 500gb? Not only that I have my laptop on 24/7 lol. I removed the battery, and placed it on top of a Thermaltake fan. I recently replaced my laptop fan, now working really good. It use to make loud noises.
I did some checking up and I've been thinking about all my external HDD? Because I constantly adding movies, files, etc, I think in the long term have an SSD will be a lot better? I need to plan it in case my old external HDD will stop working one day. It is getting slower by the year.
@kingzservingJesus: If you only have room for one drive then get the highest capacity SSD you can afford (within reason).
Try to manage your storage on your PC, use cloud storage where possible (photos/documents etc). External storage is fine for movies and stuff but don't keep anything important on it, you might drop it accidentally and bam, everything is gone.
Streaming movies/tv shows is also a good way to save on space, try an on demand service or streamallthis.is I have used in the past and has been alright (make sure you have adblock installed).
Edit: Google drive is cheap and decent storage, I just pay the $2 USD a month for 100GB storage where I keep all my photos and docs. It's a good place to throw important documents from your desktop just incase something goes wrong and your PC dies, you can always go back to drive to recover the files.
Good points. I have a conclusion to buy a large capacity SSD for laptop. Will keep the old external HDD for now until the prices of SSD drops down because if I can buy a 1TB SSD then I know for sure it will last more than a decade.
Not really keen on Cloud even though I do have it but I don't use it. Not a bad idea Google drive and it is affordable. It would come in handy to store important documents. However, I like to be in control of my own files who knows these days with extreme Hacking it is not safe?
Cool, now I will find a good SSD.
Cheers
I have a 2008 macbook pro (core 2 duo) that's still running reasonably well. Although adding an SSD is possible (i think?), I believe the benefits would be negligible
My first time with SSD was super disappointing. Back in 2014 I bought a cheapo Sandisk 120GB SSD to go in an early generation i7 using SATA2. The SSD would make a high pitched ringing noise. Its speed was so slow that it didn't even halve the OS boot time.
I gave away the Sandisk 120GB SSD to a friend and never considered SSD since.
To be fare SSD's were super expensive in 2014 which made me have high expectations. Prices and speeds have probably improved since 2014 so maybe I should reconsider SSD again.
The SSD would make a high pitched ringing noise.
You thought that was normal?
Most people probably wouldn't have been able to pick up the ringing noise. Admittedly I used to be very sensitive to high frequency noises. Nearly 1/4 of my home electronics produced high pitched ringing noises. Eg. 12V power adapters, 21 inch Samsung CRT left in standby mode, most CRT TV's when on, Set Top Boxes with cheapo transformer coils, notebook power adapters, battery chargers.
I too have heard noises that others don't re TV's in particular. The Sandisk Extreme PRO SSD I installed a year or two ago is superb (and quiet).
I too have heard noises that others don't re TV's in particular. The Sandisk Extreme PRO SSD I installed a year or two ago is superb (and quiet).
I her noises too. Mainly from the tv but they go away when i turn it off
I see dead people
SSds at that time were a young technology, you wanted reliability over speed back then, but the technology has matured since.
In 2014, SSDs were already quite good. I had my first SSD in 2011.
LOL @ SSDs being expensive in 2014. I bought my first SSD in 2008. It was $600 for a 32GB.
I bought my first SSD in 2012, 4yr 6month ago and posted it as my first ever SSD bargain
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/71367
To this day, that Crucial M4 SSD is still ticking. It was first used in a Core 2 Duo E8500 (SATA II) system, moved to Sandy Bridge (Core i5 2500k), moved to Ivy Bridge (my current gaming rig), and moved back into the Core 2 Duo (HTPC), and now it lives in my Skylake G4400 HTPC.
Never missed a beat!
Have you ever noticed any slow downs? Or wear and tear over time?
Not really, HDD Sentinel says disk health is something like 95%. Pretty good.
Modern SSD's can tolerate a huge number of writes. There was a test which showed that the consumer grade Samsung 840 Pro took around 600TB of writes before it showed any issues and it took over 2 PetaBytes of data to completely kill it.
My friend, what would you use the SSD for? I can only see Windows 7 and all programs. I have a 500gb HDD in my laptop. How do I add the SDD?
in your case your SSD would completely replace the HDD, since yours is a 2009 model it would be using a standard 2.5" inch drive.
In most laptops (yours) the HDD and SSD fit inside a 2.5" inch bay.
They look like this: http://laptoping.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Laptop-SSD-v…
but some SSD's come in a different format. For some modern ultrabooks made after 2013, SSD's can be very small and look like these.
your hard drive is easily the slowest part of your computer. Back in the days when someone's laptop was slow, people often say "upgrade the RAM!" which basically did nothing since what they were experiencing was not a shortage of RAM, but they were just waiting for the disk drive to provide the data they wanted.
most budget devices are usually packing the cheapest of hard drives, usually a conventional 5200RPM drive.
Upgrading from a spinning drive to a SSD is easily the most cost effective upgrade you can perform to a laptop. As to how you would upgrade, you'd need to look at your laptop's user manual for instructions on how to replace a HDD and then reverse the instructions to install the SSD.
@scrimshaw:
Got it! Thanks you my friend.
Cool, that's sounds right. I noticed my laptop is getting slower sometimes? As you said the SSD will be a lot better.
So that means I only can fit one SSD and it needs to be 500gb, correct?
You can buy any capacity you want. Larger SSD's are typically faster than smaller ones, and a good starting point is 240GB or more.
The Crucial MX300 is a good budget SSD, perfect for ordinary users. Try your local MSY for the best prices.
http://www.msy.com.au/search?controller=search&orderby=posit…
And yes, while I haven't checked, I'm pretty certain your laptop only has one 2.5" inch drive bay, meaning you will need to remove existing drive.
Yes, since all your data and OS is stored on the HDD.
When you add in a brand new drive into the machine, it'll be empty at first (obviously) and you will need to re-image your system.
@scrimshaw:
OK thanks. I have never done a 're-image your system'?
Cool, I think that's everything I needed to know. Will post back to see how I go.
This forum thread has time warped itself from 2008 to now. How did you do that? 88mph?
My first 'SSD' use was a CF card in an IDE adapter…not a mind blowing experience, but a pretty fair improvement nonetheless.
They have gotten significantly better IME, cheaper and much more reliable over the last few years…to the point where I wouldn't have a PC without one now.
Once you go SSD you never go back.
Reading this makes me feel itchy.
Sacrifice CPU speed for SSD if needed.
First SSD was a Gskill Phoenix 120GB in 2010 which I paid about $410 for.
My experience , I didn't notice much boot difference from a NEW install on a NEW Hard drive or an SSD
But the transfer speeds to the drive was incredible, and when installing software it was remarkably faster.
I run a 250GB SSD drive as a boot and a 1tb drive for my storage, works well IMO.
First SSD was 2008. Intel X25. Worth the $.
I first got my SSD here: https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/27154
Jesus. Can't believe it's been more than 6 years ago. SSDs should be a mainstream thing now.
Don't think I could go back. Built my brother a decent PC with just a standard HDD I had laying around and hasn't been touched- always uses the parents' one because his is "too slow".
Definitely saves a lot of time when you think about it. Even booting up once a day, which would take ~5 minutes would save me over 30 hours per year in waiting, excluding the time for loading programs and their resources. On top of that, saves power as I'm more inclined to shut down.
Got a 128 GB sandisk about 3~ years ago thinking of going back to a 2TB hdd
It was like the jump from VHS to DVD. Now I find it unbearable to use a computer with an OS running off a standard HDD.
M.2 > ssd
What? M.2 is a form factor for SSDs. There are plenty of SSDs available as M.2 or SATA. You'd go with m.2 first everytime.
I was on the verge of buying a new MacBook to replace my 5 year old MBPro (4GB Ram) because it was terribly slow.
Then I decided that rather than spending $1.5k, I would first try to replace my HDD to SSD and increase the Ram to 8 GB (or more) and see if that makes any difference. As soon as I replaced the HDD, it was like some magic happened to my dying MacBook. My MacBook became so usable that I decided not to increase my RAM from 4GB as it was just not needed.
So I will have to admit that I will never go back to HDD. Pity that it took me so long to get into SSD.
I just installed a new 500gb Samsung 850 Evo just for games. Games are so god damn large now days. I thought it might hold 20 or so. Nope not even close. Doom and Gears 4 alone are 160gb.
I use a Samsung 950 Pro m.2 for my system drive and it goes like the wind. Love it.
2x 80GB OCZ in raid 0. They were rubbish.
Night and day indeed.
With games you'll sometimes not even see the hint messages on the loading screen it loads so quick.
But yeah in terms of the OS and boot speeds, you can never go back.
My first SSD was my 2011 MacBook Air. I could never go back to a normal hard drive. Even 5 years later the Air still feels quite fast.
Same! I have the same mba as well. it's still very fast today. I also upgraded my imac's hard drive to an ssd. it was really slow when booting up and loading/switching applications, but now it runs very smoothly. I just put all the uncessary files in an external drive.
My main desktop PC does not even have a hard disk anymore, it has three Samsung 850 SSDs. 250GB PRO boot, 1TB EVO, 500GB EVO.
Quiet, cooler and fast.
2 x Samsung Evo 500GB in RAID 0. As stated earlier, I sometimes miss the loading screen hints in some games!
SSD is what made macs seem like supercomputers when they put them in the Air, boots up in seconds and navigating and opening files is so fast. Compared to a HDD an SSD is like running instead of crawling.
Most noticeable upgrade in my 20 years of PC gaming/usage… every modern PC should have an SSD boot drive!
Representative SSD first time usage expression in link: http://bit.ly/2gPYcpS
What is the best SSD for us ozbargainers and what is a good price? Would the samsung 250GB SSD be the one? Would i3 be ok with it or at least i5?
Thanks
samsung 850 evo is great, grab the 240 or higher gb, its well worth the money.
nice, thanks
The best way to explain to people how fast a decent ssd (samsung evo or something) is you know how you normally put off restarting your pc after installing a program or something cause it takes minutes to start up well i don't do that anymore cause it takes literally 10 seconds.
SSD is a must have.