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Author Topic: Solid State drive - What a difference!  (Read 3033 times)

essex2visuvesi

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Solid State drive - What a difference!
« on: October 22, 2012, 10:16:17 am »

The Wifes laptop was giving warnings about impending hard drive failiure so decided it was time to get a new drive As its only really used for interweb and a few games (nothing 3d intensive) I thought I'd give one of these new fangled Solid state drives a try.
Picked up a 64Gb 2.5" Sata drive from Ebay for about 50 quid delivered and set about the fitting.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/KingSpec-64GB-2-5-SATA-II-4CH-SSD-Solid-State-Disk-Drive-MLC-Flash-159-103MB-S-/330735447538?pt=US_Internal_Hard_Disk_Drives&hash=item4d015e6df2

First thing I did was to time the boot up with the old hard drive... Time to windows login screen (Windows 7 32bit) 52 seconds
Quick clean up (CCCleaner) and full defrag (diskkeeper)
Installed Paragon Migrate OS to SSD software.

Rebooted and did another boot timing.... Time to boot now 44 seconds
http://www.paragon-software.com/technologies/components/migrate-OS-to-SSD/

Fitted the SSD into a USB hard drive enclosure and connected to the laptop (If I was using a desktop PC this wouldn't be needed)

Next I ran the Migrate software.  This was a simple job of telling it what drive to copy the OS to.  The software does a few other things to the SSD in the back ground (for example setting the correct offset)
Copying took about 20 mins

Shut down the laptop and swapped out the drive for the new one.
Rebooted laptop and timed the boot sequence... Time to boot to login screen is now 19 seconds

The wife has been using the laptop over the weekend and is very happy, says it is hell of a lot faster to open programs and gennerally quicker all round.

Bonus points for me! and no need to buy a new laptop for another 6 months or so. This means the toys fund gains the cost of a new laptop!  :D

A couple of points to note:-
Solid state drives are expensive compared to regular Hard drives especially when moving into bigger capacity drives so may not be suitable for all but for laptop users its a surefire way to gain a bit of extra performance and give maybe a year of extra usablity
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wbeedie

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #1 on: October 22, 2012, 10:46:41 am »

SSDs are certainly faster and less prone to giving up the ghost most new laptops have them and since all the troubles in Taiwan a lot easier to get than other drives ,I got one for the OS of my main PC a few months back and what a difference
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essex2visuvesi

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #2 on: October 22, 2012, 10:58:50 am »

Another bonus is the lower power consumption.... This means when running a laptop on batteries it will last longer. Not sure by how much tho
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AlisterL

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #3 on: October 23, 2012, 10:12:51 am »

Just remember to do regular backups. or store stuff "in the cloud" (Google Docs, Windows Live, etc). When an SSD fails then you lose everything with no - I mean zero - chance of recovery. But they do make 'puters go a heck of a lot quicker...
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essex2visuvesi

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #4 on: October 23, 2012, 10:33:06 am »

All of the "Personal" data (pics, Music, documents etc) are stored elsewhere on a NAS box which is backed up to DVDs (when I remember) The laptop SSD has been cloned and stored as well
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Martin (Admin)

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #5 on: October 23, 2012, 03:32:13 pm »


I don't of anyone that has had a SSHDD fail as yet... and most of us know of someone that has had a traditional HDD fail.  {:-{
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grendel

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #6 on: October 23, 2012, 05:10:55 pm »

I have two large (1Tb and 2Tb) hard drives, as backups, everything is backed up on one or the other, some on both (photos)
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Colin Bishop

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #7 on: October 23, 2012, 05:29:17 pm »

Quote
I don't of anyone that has had a SSHDD fail as yet...

Oh Martin! Famous last words.... %)

Colin
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essex2visuvesi

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #8 on: October 23, 2012, 06:53:45 pm »

Oh Martin! Famous last words.... %)

Colin

That's it Im doing another backup... right now! lol
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Andyn

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #9 on: October 23, 2012, 09:12:19 pm »


I don't of anyone that has had a SSHDD fail as yet... and most of us know of someone that has had a traditional HDD fail.  {:-{


I know of OCZ drives failing, but mouth is firmly shtum.

19 seconds? That's still pretty slow... ;)
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NFMike

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #10 on: October 23, 2012, 10:28:16 pm »


I don't of anyone that has had a SSHDD fail as yet...


Well, there's no such thing, so obviously they can't fail :)

Seriously though, they are still very new. HDDs don't generally start to fail until a few years old, so assuming SSDs are actually more reliable it might be 5 or 6 before they start to go. By which time all the foolish virgins will have come to believe they are infallible devices and given up backups altogether. I predict Murphy will continue to have his day :)

essex2visuvesi

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #11 on: October 24, 2012, 09:12:17 am »

19 seconds? That's still pretty slow... ;)

Not bad for a 4 year old celeron laptop running windows 7 tho :)

The wife is happy with it.... thats the important thing
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Andyn

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Re: Solid State drive - What a difference!
« Reply #12 on: October 24, 2012, 10:18:29 am »

That's the fastest celery ever made then {-)
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