SSD Upgrade

[NoelC]

An SSD upgrade to my old laptop has given it a new lease of life:-

Having struggled to maintain my hard disk this year; I eventually found out how to delete all the software updates that come from microsoft and to restrict the amount of hard disk used by the automated restore points on hard disk (a change that free'd up half my hard disk space), I started to look at SSD's.  I Shoved a 1TB SSD into my laptop (as a Christmas present to myself).
https://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/storage-info.  The most tedious bit was doing a full backup (8 hours) and creating a disk image before swapping them over.  You need a connection kit (£20) to set it up; but I have a SATA - USB connector that's onlty been used once if anyone is interested.  The whole lot cost just over £150 - but smaller disks (500GB) are much cheaper. You need some small screwdrivers and a little patience - it's not tricky.

The website says it increases operating speeds by 5 times; my observations place it at nearer 10 times for my laptop (an old I3 running Win7Pro).  The startup is noticeably faster, but App switching is now nearly instantaneous, previously I needed to wait up to a minute for email to come up after using PS2 or Firefox, and with anything over 10 tabs open in Firefox everything slowed down to a crawl - now not a problem.

[Carole]

Well done Noel, I have also done something to help my desktop which was slowly grinding to a halt because the scratch disks were full.

I bought myself a 2nd back up drive and have transferred almost all my image data onto it freeing up around 25% of the hard drive.  This back up drive will be purely for imaging data.  I like to keep the old files and subs in case I want to add to them, revise them etc etc as I have done on a number of occasions.  I have chucked out some of the rubbish ones while I was at it though.

Carole

[Klitos]

That's interesting, Noel. It may help to give a bit more detail. Did you copy your old disk to the new SSD by making a full disk image backup and restore, or did you just copy data and re-install applications? If you did a disk image, what software did you use and did you encounter any problems with it?

How much RAM does your laptop have? I wouldn't have imagined that having many tabs open in your browser would have been speeded up that much by using an SSD. I suspect you may have low RAM and it was using the hard drive to page virtual memory.

[ApophisAstros]

I don't have SSD (but they are good have had in past) but my laptop has 8GB and 2TB HD and can turn on in 35 - 40 seconds and have 20 home pages opening in Chrome when it opens ie astronomy/weather/FB etc and this only takes 25 seconds or so . Very important is hard disk optimization and Norton does this for me automatically when its quiet.
Roger

[RobertM]

I only use mechanical disks for my NAS now and that's only because 6TB SSDs wouldn't be economical (about six times the cost). Mind you 6TB HDDs aren't that cheap.  For my home PC I use M2 PCIe NVMe SSD's instead of SATA, 50% extra cost for six times the performance and no drive bay (20mm x 120mm circuit board attached directly to the motherboard).  I've tended to create a fresh install on the new drive and reinstall software, that way I can install directly to the latest windows version and more importantly have a clean installation.

Robert

[NoelC]

Klitos:
Full disc image using the free versin of Acronis.  No problems except it was a very large package for my feeble broadband to download, and it takes quite a while to image.  I've only got 4GB, this system will only run 8, but I didn't think it worth the extra given system seems to page everything anyway.  Task manager normally shows memory running at about 50%.
Roger:
Good performance; suspect your laptops not as old as mine. I've been considering going to Win10 (the laptop's still on Win7Pro).

Robert
That amount of storage is beyond my comprehension. I suspect the performance of your machines is several orders of magnitude faster than my old quad core I3.  I was tempted by the machine you were selling a little while back, but my laptop doesn't work that hard very often, so opted for an upgrade instead.  Do you build your own machines from scratch?

[RobertM]

Noel, yes I have always built my main PC.