If any cheapskates are thinking about getting an SSD or that your computer is slow

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NightShade

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A Chinese restaurant that is near me and has actually helped me a lot since my wife passed away had a problem with their Point of Sale computer. I guess it has been having smart errors for quite a while and now the OS has started doing a forced check for errors. It's an all in one so the drives just get cooked (this one saw a max temp of 50C or about 122F) in them as bad as a laptop if not worse.

Anyway I pulled the drive tonight and did a quick clone to an SSD. The HDD was 320GB so not huge but good enough for most people who do a little web surfing and such. I under provisioned the drive to the exact same size they had previously so that with wear leveling and 140 GB of free space this drive should last until the system dies and then some.

Now why did I suggest an SSD for them, well first of all it doesn't generate as much heat unless it's actively reading or writing so the whole system will be a little cooler. It was also only about 4 dollars more for this drive vs a similar sized HDD for a laptop. Hence the name of this post. I did a quick speed test on the SSD and HDD so you guys can see the comparison. But basically if you have an older computer that you swear keeps getting slower and have 50 bucks but don't want to buy a new computer this may be the ticket for you.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820331049 is the drive and below you can see what a hard drive looks like compared to a SSD. I should also say that this drive is rated to read at 470 MBps and write at around 420 MBps so the read speed must be a little under rated. And even though the old drive was starting to have issues and ran for over 22k hours it likely does not affect the test results listed as they are pretty typical for a 5400RPM HDD. The SSD was on sale for 47.99 when I picked it up but even at 52.99 it's not a bad price to be honest. You can run a test on your system as well. The latest version of Crystal Disk Mark is a little different but the sequential read speed is what most people are interested in anyway. And even a desktop 7200RPM drive is slow compared to a SSD.


Hitachi 320GB HDD.jpg
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Making the switch took about ten minutes to copy the data as only about 35 GB is used in the system and I know some of the less technically inclined will not know what to do so I will say that if you are interested and near Guthrie you can drop the drives off with me and pick them back up later or the next day. Since it's basically a few clicks and such for the members I will say pay me what you think it was worth. Or you guys can drop a few bucks to the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research in honor of my wife or even just put them in your donation point for Amazon Smile.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/about/ref=smi_se_dshb_aas_saas

Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research
Location: Chicago, IL | Year Founded: 2000
Mission: The Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research is the nation's leading nonprofit organization dedicated to finding a cure for this disease and improving care for sarcoidosis patients.

Programs: Patient Resource and Education Program (PREP), Clinical Studies Network, Sarcoidosis Advanced Registry for Cures (SARC)
 

TwoForFlinching

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I thought SSD's were prime for operating systems that don't get rewrite cycles often. Granted, I haven't read up on them much in the last two or three years, but do they have about half the write cycle lifespan still? $50 is cheap!
 

tRidiot

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I thought SSD's were prime for operating systems that don't get rewrite cycles often. Granted, I haven't read up on them much in the last two or three years, but do they have about half the write cycle lifespan still? $50 is cheap!

Used to be a worry about read-write cycles and such, but not such a big deal anymore. I've been using 'em for years, in fact, I have gone with only a single 256GB M.2 drive in my new office computer I just built. Barely need any store there at all - at home I have something like 5TB in my desktop and an 8TM NAS. But these new M.2 drives are so slick... they're like a stick of gum in size. Essentially like a USB flash drive, but it's just the board. I love it.

Long story short, you don't have to worry about SSDs anymore really, they're long-lasting, durable and incredibly fast. Technology is incredible.
 

SlugSlinger

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Thanks OP for the information. I’ve switched our old desktop to an SSD a couple years ago and it’s amazing the speed of booting up, almost instantly compared to the old HDD. And we’ve had no issues since the change out.
I also have a 4 year old HP laptop at work with an SSD that I treat pretty badly and do a lot of data crunching with Access and Excel. It keeps on ticking. The original HDD in the laptop gave up within the first year but I think HP had an issue with defective drives at that time. Switched to the SSD and work life became much more bearable.
 

Glock 40

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SlugSlinger you mentioned the most noticeable thing with an SSD boot times cut to seconds from from over a minute. The last machine I built I am still using. It was built the end of 2011 at that time the price point was $1.75 a gig for smaller ssd drives. I put in a 128gig Crucial drive as my OS disk. All my programs are written to that drive and all caching done there. When I completed the machine from turning power on till it was fully loaded at the desktop was 18 seconds. 7.5 years latter that disk is still kicking along with no issues. My wifes laptop has a 128gb ssd disk also and it is probably 6 years old with no issues.

I spent many years in a large data center with 20k+ devices. I did Enterprise storage and Servers. I can tell you SSDs are very robust and will outlast the usefulness of most computers. The drive I mentioned before still shows a 93% life and the disk has been on 2931 hours . Its so old it wont show the amount of host writes like newer ones will. Anyone that asks me I always tell an SSD is the most important upgrade you can make to improve computer performance. I replaced my 1TB HDD storage disk with a 1TB SSD a couple years ago at that time the price was down to .25 a gig. I remember when 3.5in HDD got to $100 a gig in 97 or 98 and thought that was the best price ever a 3.5 gig drive for $350 I thought I could download the world.

crucial75.jpg
 

Shadowrider

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Almost two years ago I upgraded the drive in my 2011 iMac to SSD. I went with a 500gig Samsung drive. The performance difference is shocking.

It wasn't $50 though so it better last! I hope to get another couple of years out of the machine. 10 years on a box is pretty good IMO.
 

DavidMcmillan

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Boy, I don't know what you guys just said, but I am greatly impressed! Between some of you creating great stuff and you guys knowing the ins and outs of various systems, I'm learning things every day. Thanks!
 

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