Drive upgrades...SSD and USB

Wungun

Active Member
Found an almost new Adata SSD (128GB) for $75 and bought a 1TB Samsung USB drive on sale for $69

Yanked out my old partitioned 500GB HDD from my "frontend"...installed the OS to the SSD and copied all my media to the USB drive.

For those who have never used a SSD equipped PC...holy crap!!! It's fast!! It's as if everything is loaded into RAM already (and I feel confident I don't have to use/add any more ram than I already have...2GB)

The USB drive copies at a steady 20+MB/s and that's plenty fast enough for playback, etc.

I'm a little better off now with less noise (audible and electrically) on the PC's rails, and I can unplug the USB drive and plug it into my car to get full media access there as well when I want to...
Win-win!
 
I put a hybrid drive in my older laptop. Its faster than the old drive was, but has a decent amount of space (500 gb) at a price I was willing to spend on a 7 year old laptop. SSD is the way to go if you want speed, but the price per gig is definitely not down enough to use it for mass media storage yet.
 
I swapped the conventional hard drive in my laptop to a SSD and when playing Windows Media Player I no longer get any digital stutter like I did when the old drive was performing other tasks. WAYYY faster startup and shutdown too. Only downside is price/GB. I went from a 500GB conventional HDD to a 240GB SSD. I wouldn't hesitate to do it again! Just had to offload some files onto external drives. No biggie.
 
Yeah, can be pricey...
I'm my case, I could of even went with a 64Gb for just the OS and a few programs...
Buying used will save ya nearly 50%
Well worth it though!
 
An SSD was a huge upgrade for my old Lenovo laptop. It's nothing special – a Pentium P6100 2GHz with 4GB RAM Win7 machine that was slow and bogged down with typical OEM bloat-ware. When the hard-drive died in it I took a chance on a small (64Gb) SSD and did a clean, minimal install of Win7 – I have several TB of storage available on our LAN.

The Lenovo was transformed – boots in about 25 seconds and is lightning fast. We use it wirelessly for browsing, office applications and photo editing (with the files living on the NAS) and still have half the drive space available.

I have Jriver 19 on it for audio streaming to a USB connected DAC which works great and surprisingly, I've found it can even handle on-the-fly format conversion & upscaling to DSD128 without a hitch - even wirelessly - something I didn't think would ever work with this old piece.
 
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I just did a swap of my optical drive with SSD last weekend on my MBP. I went this route so I could keep the old 750gb drive and add the 250 SSD. It a lot faster and gives me more storage. Very happy with the swap. I have a USB bluray drive if I need it for some reason. I kept win7 on the old drive, but that is mainly because I don't use it that often and it isn't worth the trouble to move it at this point.

I also plan to update my iMac at some point, but it requires an external thunderbolt drive (for me to do it) and that can be more pricey.
 
I swapped the conventional hard drive in my laptop to a SSD and when playing Windows Media Player I no longer get any digital stutter like I did when the old drive was performing other tasks. WAYYY faster startup and shutdown too. Only downside is price/GB. I went from a 500GB conventional HDD to a 240GB SSD. I wouldn't hesitate to do it again! Just had to offload some files onto external drives. No biggie.

Well here I am almost a month later and I have to confess, the swap to an SSD only half the size of my original drive was too much of a compromise. I didn't have enough room to do what I wanted so...

I decided to try Seagate's new hybrid drive, the LAPTOP SSHD 1TB. It gives you a 1TB conventional hard drive (at 5400rpm) and it is coupled with an 8GB SSD. They say they have done studies showing what people actually use and how their performance needs tie in and they say this is the best ratio of performance to price point. It is NOT as fast as a dedicated SSD but for most applications still faster than a conventional drive (even at 7200rpm). And it is only a little more expensive than a conventional 1TB 2.5" drive but WAYYY cheaper than a 1TB SSD. Like $108 versus $550-800!

I've only had it installed for a couple of days and so far I'm good with it. They say it does get faster over time as your computing habits become known to the firmware within the drive and it starts shuffling the most common apps and files over to the hyperfast SSD portion of the drive. I did notice that the boot time was noticeably faster after a few restarts from when it was first installed. And unlike my original conventional drive, Windows Media Player doesn't continuously stutter while playing back music.

In a desktop where adding multiple drives is no problem, you don't need a giant SSD, just have a modest size for the OS and put everything else on a cheap, giant conventional drive. But with laptops only having space for one drive, a large SSD gets expensive.

So for me, this seems to be a good balance between capacity/performance and price.
 
In a desktop where adding multiple drives is no problem, you don't need a giant SSD, just have a modest size for the OS and put everything else on a cheap, giant conventional drive. But with laptops only having space for one drive, a large SSD gets expensive.
As I mentioned in the above post, my laptop (MBP) had a CD drive that I pulled out to make room for the SSD. I actually moved the 750GB to the space left by the optical drive and put the SSD where the 750GB was. I read that the MBP prefers booting from a drive in that space.
 
As I mentioned in the above post, my laptop (MBP) had a CD drive that I pulled out to make room for the SSD. I actually moved the 750GB to the space left by the optical drive and put the SSD where the 750GB was. I read that the MBP prefers booting from a drive in that space.

So you're saying that modern laptop optical drives have the same SATA/power connectors as any 2.5" drive? And swapping a second drive in place of the optical drive works fine? Any problems with the OS or BIOS accessing it?

I didn't know that! It's been years since I pulled an optical drive out of a laptop and it was old enough that I think it was a proprietary PATA connector setup.

Interesting...:scratch2:
 
So you're saying that modern laptop optical drives have the same SATA/power connectors as any 2.5" drive? And swapping a second drive in place of the optical drive works fine? Any problems with the OS or BIOS accessing it?

I didn't know that! It's been years since I pulled an optical drive out of a laptop and it was old enough that I think it was a proprietary PATA connector setup.

Interesting...:scratch2:
I have a 2011 early Macbook Pro. I wrote about it here and I linked a video (not mine) that gives an example of how to do it.

I am able to boot off of it without any issues. I have a Windows partition on the 750GB and it also runs fine. I am not sure if it is possible with every modern laptop, but you should research your brand to see if it is possible. I have a terabyte of space and my MBP is A LOT faster.
 
I didn't know that! It's been years since I pulled an optical drive out of a laptop and it was old enough that I think it was a proprietary PATA connector setup.

Interesting...:scratch2:

No guarantee with a laptop. Better than in the past? Yeah, I think so, but...
 
Man...I have to find another SSD to put in my desktop...get rid of the 2x500gb raid stripe.

I have FOUR 128Gb SSD SATA3 Drive in a RAID Ø as the Working/Boot Drive in my workstation, and mass storage is handle by a 2Tb Cavier Black

If you think one SSD is Fast . . .

The funny thing is once you have had one SSD in a machine you cant use a machine without one without being like whats wrong with this machine?

I ended up putting them in every machine I own; WebServer, File Server, (2) workstations and a Laptop!

They have com down in price to the point that there is no reason to not be running one.

4_OCZ_SSD.JPG


SSD%20Atto%20Comparison.jpg
 
I've read in real-world testing, SSD in RAID (even just 2 drives) doesn't really translate to much increased speeds...
4 drives...?! That's not a small investment in storage!
 
Not relevant to playing music, but for transfer and backup, be sure you go with USB 3.0 if using USB and if you can. Had been using somewhat older HDDs and then got one USB 3.0. My transfer and backups went from average ~28MB/s to ~98MB/s.
 
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