I was working at Intel back in the early 80s when Intel invented the flash drive (back then it was an EEPROM; almost the same). Of course then it was small capacity, slow and expensive, but the potential seemed huge. I remember remarking to a fellow engineer that we should shortly be able to replace our hard drives with flash memory. Current capacities weren’t large enough and it was much too expensive in those days, but I didn’t think it would be long before hard drives were obsolete.
Fast forward 30 years. During this time flash memory has continued to get faster and cheaper, but hard drives have also kept moving ahead getting larger and cheaper, and a little faster.
Hard drives are still cheaper than “Solid State Drives” (or SSD, as flash-based hard drives are called), but we seem to have reached a tipping point where it might be worth the extra cost for the gain in performance. So today I replaced the hard drive in my main desktop computer with an SSD.
I am amazed at the improvement in performance. It is greater than any other upgrade I have ever done, including upgrading the CPU or adding RAM. Windows 7 used to take over 2 minutes to cold boot, with icons trickling in for a minute or two after that, but it now is totally up and ready in about 20 seconds. Programs launch almost immediately. Even web browsing is much, much faster; apparently I haven’t been limited by my internet connection but rather by hard drive speed. When I compile programs, the hard drive used to thrash around loading libraries and modules for up to a minute; now it is not quite instantaneous, but very, very fast. Programs close much faster (as they write their configuration files to disk) and system shut down is much faster. I will no longer dread doing a Windows Update with the required reboot, since I can be back up and running in less than a minute.
If you are thinking of replacing your computer because it is too slow, you might consider just replacing the hard drive with an SSD for less than the cost of a new computer. It might give you more benefit for your money.
I got one from the Samsung 840 EVO series. They seem to have the best price and competitive performance.
20 responses so far ↓
1 Richard // Mar 23, 2014 at 7:31 am
I’ve been following their development closely too. It seems that an SSD in a laptop would be a big advantage because it would be less susceptible to damage from jarring. What size did you get?
2 Daryl // Mar 23, 2014 at 8:14 am
I went big and got the 1 TB drive. I had an almost full 500 GB (RAID) drive already, and wanted a little headroom. And it is recommended to leave some empty space on an SSD so the controller can spread the wear around.
I’ve lost the security of the redundant RAID array, but an SSD should be more reliable than rotating media anyway.
I think you should do it. Just make sure your laptop has a SATA connection, ideally SATA III, but SATA II is good. All the drives come in 2.5″ laptop format. You can get a 120 GB for $84, or a 250 for $140. That’s probably as much space as your laptop has now.
Read the reviews on Amazon. Everyone raves about how much faster their laptop or desktop runs after the upgrade. Average rating is a full 5 stars.
3 Richard // Mar 23, 2014 at 8:48 am
I currently have a 300G drive (or close to it) partitioned 75 & 205. Then there’s the hidden recovery partition most laptops have. I’d probably go with a 500. I’m keeping a large number of photos and quite a few ISO’s on my machine.
Some of the reviews indicate that copying that is problematic using the provided software. I’m guessing there is a way to clone the drive that would get it all. It would sure breathe new life into my Asus W7 i3 machine.
I’m also thinking about upgrading my NAS to a raided system. I now have a 2TB Seagate GoFlex. This would allow me to get rid of my RAIDed desktop that only serves as a repository now.
4 Richard // Mar 23, 2014 at 8:52 am
I was referring to copying the recovery partition when I said “that”.
5 Daryl // Mar 23, 2014 at 8:52 am
The cloning software from Samsung worked fine for me, though I understand it doesn’t copy the recovery partition. But if you just save the old hard drive you can put it back in if you need to restore, right?
500 is probably right.
6 Richard // Mar 23, 2014 at 9:08 am
Yes, but that means I have to save something in a place I could find it if the need arose. The benefit would be the ability to recover to factory condition if the SSD failed completely. It’s probably easier than keeping recovery CD’s.
7 Don // Mar 23, 2014 at 10:52 am
We’ve been using SSDs at work for several years on the laptops that run our Antenna design software. It makes a big difference on anything that does a lot of virtual memory use.
Patrick upgraded his whole machine about a month ago and went the SSD route and has been raving about it’s performance too.
I’ve been wanting to get one for my home computer for a while too as my Visual Studio takes forever to switch between design view and code view on one of my programs. I suspect that might make a big difference there too.
Maybe I should do it at work to verify I get the improvement there. I do have 24 GB RAM on that machine but I think it uses the hard drive more than the extra RAM.
I didn’t know they had 1 TB drives yet. I had seen 500 GB but not the TB. I’ve only got a 500 GB on my home machine for the C: now so it would probably be fine to go with the same thing and just Ghost it.
8 Daryl // Mar 23, 2014 at 1:13 pm
The TB drive came out last summer, but prices continue to drop pretty quickly, now less than 50 cents/GB.
The Samsung cloning SW worked fine, but I don’t know if it would be any better than Ghost. Maybe Ghost would be able to duplicate the recovery partition too, though I didn’t need that.
I had problem converting from RAID to AHCI, since the wrong drivers were loaded in Windows — kept blue screening until I figured out a way to install the drivers. That’s the only problem I had in the installation..
The Samsung also comes with optimizing software that sets up cache etc.
9 Donna // Mar 23, 2014 at 2:46 pm
Do they come in colors? Did you get red or blue?
10 Daryl // Mar 23, 2014 at 6:24 pm
Only gray. I suppose you could paint it, if that was important to you.
11 Donna // Mar 24, 2014 at 12:15 pm
You know that was a joke to indicate I don’t get all this geek talk, right?
12 Daryl // Mar 24, 2014 at 12:17 pm
My reply was in the same spirit. I mean, who would ever want to paint a 1TB NAND TLC SSD??? Gray is the perfect color, as anyone would know.
13 Don // Mar 24, 2014 at 5:37 pm
We now have a SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE1T0BW 2.5″ 1TB SATA III TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) on order for my work machine. Looking forward to see if it fixes my Visual Studio issue. If so I’ll get one at home.
14 Daryl // Mar 24, 2014 at 5:43 pm
That’s the same one I got. You will need a mount to convert 2.5″ to 3.5″ unless it is going in a laptop.
15 Don // Mar 24, 2014 at 6:38 pm
Oops! Thanks for the tip. I didn’t order one but guess I better.
16 Don // Mar 24, 2014 at 6:38 pm
I couldn’t find a blue or red one…
17 Daryl // Mar 24, 2014 at 6:39 pm
Donna will be disappointed.
18 Don // Mar 27, 2014 at 3:08 pm
Got it installed. Quite an improvement. From Starting Windows to the Login prompt it takes 12 seconds. From login till it’s usable it’s another 5 -8 seconds.
Yay! But….. it didn’t help my Visual Studio issue one bit.
19 Daryl // Mar 27, 2014 at 3:55 pm
The boot/login time seems pretty comparable to what I see. But I also see a big improvement in compiling programs (Borland, not VS). Too bad!
20 Don // Mar 28, 2014 at 9:35 am
My problem isn’t the compiling. It’s because I use a bunch of Table Layout Panels so that my interface can resize easily.
I thought that’s what they were for but when I got a guy from Microsoft involved last year that’s what he finally told me (after working on it for a week).
You would think they could deal with it if they allow it. The interesting thing is if I close the form that has all the TLPs before I go to run it there’s no lag. Just going to have to continue doing that.
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