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?
Recent experience is: If SSD goes faulty you are screwed. Good luck getting any data out of it.
Another advantage of an SSD for me was the fact that they were so expensive so we were forced to buy small capacities (~10 years ago now). This way, everyone multiple backed up all their personal data to external hard drives, keeping the SSD for software. I still prefer only having a 128gb SSD as my Windows drive.
I looked at my 15K SAS arrays and thought, wow i cant wait until i can get that kind of space with this kind of speed.
We are here now and its glorious.
It turned my life around, everyone should have one.
Same could be said with a 60Hz vs 144Hz monitor.
I creamed my pants.
Too bad we can only posts links to pictures, otherwise I'd be posting a pic of Randy after using the internet for the first time in weeks..
Can't remember my initial thoughts.
I went SSD 5-6 years ago, couldn't go back now. Still regularly deal with HDD on customers' PCs and can feel my life ticking away as I wait.
I try to ensure all friends/family who come to me for PC/laptop get an SSD in there. Cause then when I have to fix their viruses it's less time consuming.
Agree with above point about having small SSDs so you're "forced" to backup on regular HDDs or external media. Having said that, HDDs can also fail in a similar manner, and SSDs have come a long way in terms of reliability. Still, wouldn't consider getting anything larger than 500GB as price becomes a sore point, when you can get 1TB or 2TB regular drives for far cheaper. Not everything needs to be or even fully benefits from being on an SSD..
First time for me was when I bought a Macbook Air 11" with the Core2 Duo processor… even for many years thereafter, the SSD in that made it feel alot snappier than other PCs but I hadn't used a same spec Mac before without an SSD making comparisons difficult.
That being said, in my laptop when I installed a Samsung m2 SSD and migrated Windows over, it felt so much faster too. This was a clearer comparison since I had used the exact Inspiron 7559 both before and after the move to SSD so could appreciate it.
My computer is really old now. E8400, 4gb ram and normal HDD. Maybe I should invest in a SSD..
It is really slow to start up and use.
go for it. you don't know what you are missing.
I loved my E8400! 45nm cpu core.. that was such an EPIC CPU!!!
Definitely worth adding the SSD.
I think you'll be so happy with the overall performance increase on the PC that you'll keep it for a few more years.
Worst case scenario, if you are still unhappy - you can take the SSD to your new PC and use it as part of that build.
Yeah I think I will go for it. It can be quite frustrating to use the PC lately because it lags and freezes when too many tabs are open in web browser, and after logging in I need to wait a few minutes until it is smooth enough to use. I assume with SSD I have to reinstall Windows onto that drive??
I have 2x 2gb DDR2 ram. Do you think I should upgrade it to DDR3 as well?? My GPU is the HD7770 1GB. I don't do much gaming anymore so don't think I need any upgrade there. Just would love to get this computer nice and fast again as I want to do some photo/video editing too.
Yeah, I've used Lightroom 5 on my E8400 with a ATI 4850 (very old card) for many years.
An SSD will really fix a lot of those issues you've stated above.
Leave the RAM - while it would be nice to have more… your motherboard will only support DDR2. By that stage you've updated too many things and spent too much money.
Leave the current setup with everything the same and just add an SSD. See how you go with the performance increase. If you're still unhappy - start looking into upgrading the motherboard cpu and ram all together with a current generation set of parts.
There are two ways you can go about installing the SSD
- clone your current hard drive.
- fresh install.
I would recommend the fresh install for maximum benefits. If you are really lazy and don't have the time, the clone works well too.
All the best mate!
It felt like leaping 10 years into the future. But you've got to do regular backups.
When playing games, the loading screen is significantly reduced and when playing online I'm always the first of my friends to appear in game.
Boot time and softare launch speeds have increased dramatically. I used to leave the room and get something to drink or go to the loo after I started certain programs, now it's a couple of seconds!
To be honest though - every newer version of Windows helped. Win 7 was faster to boot than XP, Win 8.x was yet again faster than 7. Win 10 is faster yet still. This is due to a number of optimisations such as delayed services loading or that it is in semi-hibernation mode these days really helps with all this. I'd argue that Win10 boots relatively quickly on a modern SATA-3 HDD these days.
Ive had ssd for 3 yrs now, and am still surprised at how quick my pc's bootup. I also remember the days i would format every 6 months just to keep the pc fast.
My first SSD was a Kingston back in 2009. It was faster than my 7200rpm HDD but did not exactly blew me off my socks. I upgraded to a Crucial M4 two years later and, MY, that was a real upgrade. I still use it in my secondary system and it remains a fantastic performer.
I installed a SSD into a Dell E6420 laptop and ran into problems where it would just shut down aftre a few seconds. It has an i7 CPU and the SSD made everything work so much faster that the CPU overheated and it was this that tripped the shutdowns. Had to take the heatsink off and replace the thermal paste. Works great now. It's surprising how much a regular hard drive slows everything up.
My old first built pc (2008) use to take forever to boot with HDD. The worst parts were when i would be playing Dota 2 with friends and i had to restart sometimes i would never make it back in time. After constant pressure from my friend on multiple occasions i jumped at 500gb 850 Evo for $188 (wish i had bought 2!!). Now my boots are so fast they log me into games faster than my friends. PC boots in few seconds. I cant go back with these boot times. And ive never missed a game since :D
Shortly after this i built my 2nd pc (2016). So the investment carried over. Purchase was worth it. Thats just my 2 cents :)
First SSDs for me where Corsair F series from 2010. 40GB it was, I think.
Few Intels and Samsungs after that.
Hid all my spinning drives in a closet now.
Today, my PC has
256GB 960Pro M.2 as boot drive
400GB Intel 750 as work drive
2x1TB 850 Evo drives for storage and games.
I do appreciate the speed of NVME drives, so aiming to make my PC SATA free in 2017.
I hope I will never have to go back to spinning drives in my computers.
Cheers
First got it on my birthday back in 2010, t'was quite expensive back then for a 120GB capacity. Installed it on the night I got it, and finished installing Windows on it (did not think about cloning back then) then went to sleep.
The next morning, woke up, and turned on and was about to turn around to grab a breakfast, but I saw that the desktop was already showing… Damn that was fast… And then I have never looked at booting from a HDD ever again.
The end.
Had a mechanical hard drive that was on its last legs, bought a 120gb patriot inferno.
Instant buyers remorse until it arrived and I ghosted my boot drive over, now, I'd have a good whack of programs in my startup folder, a load of saved tabs in Firefox, etc.
It'd take a good 10 minutes from power on to a usable desktop.
When it took 5 minutes to copy everything over because I was limited by the read speed of the mechanical drive I was amazed, when it took 30s from power on to a YouTube video in an open tab playing I knew the future was here.
They are indespensable.
Bought my first 60GB one ages ago and enjoyed the stupid bootup speed for a week before it died. Then got a replacement which died in the same way after 4 weeks. Was pretty bitter about SSDs by then after my housemate had the same issue with 2. My third replacement has been going strong since.
Will NEVER, EVER use a HDD for a boot drive again. They have been relegated to storage only.
Anyone got a link to a good article or YouTube video that explains in Layman terms step by step how to swap over from a regular hard drive to ssd?
No idea how to do the hardware or software part!
Not sure if the below video is layman enough but give it a watch and see if you can follow the steps.
Thanks, I'll check it out
Back in 2009. Back then, SSDs had reliability problems and I had many failures for the first few years, but I could never go back to laggy mechanical hard drives.
Bought my first Intel X25 back in 2008. Everyone said omg its so expensive. Would have done it again in a heartbeat
I am still using it to this day and it has been the single best upgrade. (from my Q6600 PC, to an i5-4670K)
Same. Put an X25 in my Mac Mini in 2008. Still use it every day.
When I SpaceSniffer on my SSD raid 0 the info is there almost immediately.
One day I ran it on my standard 7200 black scorpio, and thought my computer was not responding.
Do you have to put these inside a computer? sorry I have no idea
Been using an SSD for years on my home desktop. Started at a 60GB OCZ, now on a 240GB Sandisk (probably nearing another upgrade soon).
My work desktop came up for renewal earlier this year… looked at the specs… 5400RPM HDD :-|.
Dell - Why on earth would you couple an i7 and 16GB of RAM with a 5400RPM HDD?
I managed to order a different model to standard, with a 512gb M2 SSD.
My home desktop has a HDD for games / programs I don't frequently use.
I could never ever go back to a HDD for my OS.
I used WD Velociraptors in Raid 0. The SSD was a nice change, because HDDs generate a lot of heat.
People should really differentiate between SSDs.
PCIE NVME SSDs (x4) offer next level speeds. My Samsung 960 Pro has ridiculously fast speeds. 5 times faster than normal SATA SSDs in terms of sequential read speeds. Very handy when I'm interacting with my server and passing >100 GB files back and forth.
Normal SATA SSDs are still bottlenecked at 6 Gb/s.
The deciding factor for me was when i was playing online battlefield 4, as the maps are very large, by the time my PC would load a map change, other people in the game who had switched to a SSD had already loaded it up, started playing, and captured the first points / flags before I even was able to select a team! So I got one, moved windows and Origin / BF4 over to it, and are often the first person in the map (not to mention all the other general improvements to speed of booting and general PC use)… Not going back
The deciding factor for me was when i was playing online battlefield 4
World of Warcraft too. I play both games.
To this day I still think BF4 games take forever to load even though I am using a standard SATA SSD. lol
mindblown
I bought an Xbone against my older brothers will.
Never forgave me.
A year later, I used the acquired funds from a casual position at max as to build a PC
Due to intense frugalness, I argued that a HDD would be of better value.
My brother wouldn't hear of it made me by a Samsung evo 850
I was 15 (this ordeal was a year ago) and I had never used a computer since the age of 7, yep I dunno had an iPad I guess.
Then as he bottled the computer and discharges from my male enloop projectiles across the room we timed the loading of windows for the first time and it hit 3 and a half seconds.
He cried from rapture. Best day of me and my brothers life. Will definitely mention it in his eulogy.
the first time i got an ssd was when i was 17, went in raw and almost broke my nob in half
Hi OzBners,
I have a Macbook Pro mid 2009 with 8 GB Ram which I was thinking of replacing in the new year. But after reading this forum I thought of buying a SSD instead of a new laptop.
I went to buy one. The guy at the counter told me to first research that which SSD would work with my laptop. I called up Apple and some of its authorised re sellers but no luck. No straight forward answer on the internet to this. Can you guys please help me with it???
Would any 2.5' SSD with with my laptop or are there any specific ones which I should look for?
Thank you!
video instructions on Cnet
https://www.cnet.com/au/how-to/upgrade-your-macbook-install-…
The Samsung 840 is now old and obsolete and now been replaced with the newer generation Samsung 850.
http://www.staticice.com.au/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=samsung+EVO…
You can also consider buying a more budget Crucial MX300 if you value storage space versus speed.
Some other accessories that you may wish to own to make use of your old / refurbished drive, plus you will also need one to connect your SSD to your macbook initially to clone it.
A 2.5" hard drive enclosure that you can stick your old hard drive into to turn into a pocket drive. It's best to buy a branded one from a computer store rather than some cheap chinese generic.
e.g Patriot Gauntlet or Astone ISO
or
a cheap USB 3.0 => SATA connector which does the same thing as the enclosure, it's just a lot less pretty and your drive is still exposed to dust / water etc.
Thanks Scrimshaw !
What if I don't want to clone my old HD to SSD? All my stuff (Photos, Notes, Word, etc) is all stored in iCloud. I would just be able to download everything from there.
So will it be OK if I install SSD and then OS straight away?
yeah the cloning is just a time-saving step, also saving you the download bandwidth required to install everything again., you can just slap in an SSD and go ahead and install the OS from scratch.
Another question arises is installing macOS. As Sierra doesn't support Macbook Pro 2009, will I be able to download previous OS El Capitan from the Recovery Mode?
I don't know Macs very well, but like Windows, El Capitan lets you create a bootable USB drive to hold the operating system installation files. You only need a 8GB thumb drive for the process.
For experienced users, refer to
https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201372
http://www.macworld.com/article/2981585/operating-systems/ho…
For easy mode, try
http://www.techradar.com/how-to/computing/how-to-download-an…
My first SSD was a 40GB Intel X25-X, which I bought 8 years ago. The upgrade from HDD to SSD was amazing!!!!
After that I had two 50GB OCZ Vertex 2's in RAID-0. Didn't give any feeling of performance increase other than in benchmarks.
Then I had a single 120GB Kingston Hyper-X, which also didn't give any feeling of performance increase. Same with my 250GB Samsung 840 and my current 500GB Samsung 850Evo. I just upgraded for more space, and not speed.
AFAIK, a modern NVMe drive like the 960 Pro won't be any faster either, except in some specific use cases.
Went to MSY to buy an SSD. The guy over there was not helpful at all. I took my laptop (Dell M4500) and asked him for a compatible harddisk. I even took out the current SATA hard disk and showed it to him asking for corresponding SSD. He said I should know which hard disk I want; Claimed "We are third party item sellers here; we cannot recommend a hard disk for your laptop". I was like, Mate help me out here. I don;t want to buy a wrong one which is not compatible with my laptop.
He just showed me the price list they had and asked me to select for myself.
There goes my first attempt at buying an SSD. Will do a proper research about compatible SSD and then try again, current web search shows that Samsung EVO SATA will be fine.
So what would you have done if he recommended one which was not compatible with your laptop or didn't perform to your satisfaction? No doubt you would have returned it for exchange or refund. MSY are well known for expecting their customers to know what they want before they walk into the store.
Get a standard 2.5" 9.5mm ssd.
Dont get msata.
Cheapest is usually Amazon, 1 week delivery, use it exactly like a mech HDD
But your comp is old.
It will be limited to SATA2 interface.
Just saying, you can go for a cheaper ssd with slower read and write (still miles ahead)
Speed limit for SATA2 is 300MB/s max.
Samsung evo 850s surpass that by 50%.
Not saying you wont feel the difference but just keep that in mind.
For example my old Asus n43jf that comes from the same era as your m4500 boots in 20 seconds with an ssd.
My ux303 with an evo takes 8 seconds.
Thanks Cwongtech. This was a very nice and useful explanation.
No probs.
Any of those "entry Level" ssds will be fine for your purposes, and surpass the sata2 limit. SanDisk ultra plus is fine, they're cheaper as well. Save some money :)
The TLC vs MLC thing is pointless unless you're wiping and rewriting massive amounts of data per day, they usually estimate the life of write cycles in terms of 20GB per day.
Unless you have nbn (and download 24/7), or edit photos and videos on that m4500, it doesn't matter.
Bought my first one (OCZ Vertex 3) back in 2011, I just couldn't stop laughing it was hard to believe that shit was real. Ever since then I've put SSDs in every machine I've owned.
I used to reformat windows every three - six months because things would get too slow… Now, with an SSD, I think I'm 18 months running.
The i3 is a dual core i5, but generally with a higher clock speed
If the software you use doesn't need (or use) all 4 cores of an i5 effectively, the i3 will actually be superior
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i3-6320-vs-I…