Solid State Hard Drive

[Bill Seward]

I just cloned my 500gb standard spinning disk hard drive to a 240gb Solid State Drive. The cloning took about 90 minutes, and another 10 minutes to swap the drives. Windows 7 previously took about 5 minutes to completely boot from off. The machine now takes about 35 seconds. Programs open instantly, and shutdown only takes 10 seconds. I got the drive, a PNY C900 and a SATA to USB cable from Newegg.com for less than $70.00 shipped. There was a 15% code for the drive, and a $2.00 code for the cable.

I'm very impressed.

The old drive can sit in a box on my shelf, just in case.....

 

[Zeus36]

I've switched all my computers to SSD for the boot drive and used the old hard drive as a "D:" drive for data and extra storage. Or just as a cloned mirror image back up.

Games and browsers go on the SSD. Data, music, documents and pictures sit mostly on the D: drive and are shared between both drives if there is room on the SSD.

Both drives are either cloned to tertiary 7200 RPM Hard Drives plus backed up to a 5TB external drive with Seagate Discwizard.

I get lots of spare hard drives, computers and laptops during E-Waste collection (part of my job)

 

[Bill Seward]

I did the upgrade to a Samsung laptop. I'm thinking of swapping the DVD drive for a hard drive caddy with the old drive. I've got a USB external DVD drive for the rare occasion I need it. It should be a simple swap. The BIOS is set to look at the DVD as the first boot device, so I may have to change that to the SSD..

I also volunteer for an electronics recycle in my town. You can bet I'll be looking at laptops that may be turned in to see if I can score any more SSDs...

I added 4 gigs more ram to the machine a few weeks ago. That in itself gave things a boost.

 

[D-Max2012]

When I was working for my former company, they kept complaining about the 3 year old computers taking a long time to boot and operate. Also because they were running alot of calculations that R/W to/from the HDD. Along with a memory upgrade, I convinced them to
purchase SSHD. The machines got at least a 50% increase in speed. Saved the company over a million, across the board, instead of purchasing new computers. I changed my own to SSHD way before this.. C and D are SSHD, plus 2 mini external conventional drives for storage.

 

[redneksoldier]

I acquired a Dell Alienware desktop through a bit of luck and long story of Dell's warranty/repair department losing my cheap POS work computer when i sent ot in for repair. The Alienware has a 500GB SSHD and (3) 1.5TB HDDs all set up as a RAID system. That thing starts up and shuts down super fast I'm not a gamer at all, so I'm sure I don't use it as it was intended. Mostly, we use it as a whole-home media device so that we can access all of our media from any device in the house. Even with 2 phones and 3 TVs all streaming different media, the fan barely even comes on.

 

[caseyjones955]

I think it might be about time to stack the traditional HDs next to the 8 track players and rotary dial phones that make an actual "ring" sound. I'm next in line for this, been considering it for awhile since it's about upgrade time. I hope I can clone the boot drive as Bill did.

 

[Bill Seward]

I used Mini Tools Partition Wizard to clone the drive, available online. It's free. I cloned a 500 to a 240. There was only about 90gb on the drive, so all I had to do was resize the partitions to fit on the SSD, and it worked flawlessly. The Copy Disk function made it easy. If you clone same size drives, it's even easier. You'll need a USB to SATA cable to put the SSD into the system for cloning. After cloning, just swap the new drive into the drive bay in the laptop. Believe me, it's well worth the money and effort..

If you are doing a desktop, you'll need a caddy to mount the 2.5 inch drive into a 3.5 inch bay, and a SATA cable to hook it up to the hard drive, if you want to keep the old drive in the system for storage. Then go to the BIOS to rearrange boot order to boot from the new drive, if needed.

 

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I acquired a Dell Alienware desktop through a bit of luck and long story of Dell's warranty/repair department losing my cheap POS work computer when i sent ot in for repair. The Alienware has a 500GB SSHD and (3) 1.5TB HDDs all set up as a RAID system. That thing starts up and shuts down super fast I'm not a gamer at all, so I'm sure I don't use it as it was intended. Mostly, we use it as a whole-home media device so that we can access all of our media from any device in the house. Even with 2 phones and 3 TVs all streaming different media, the fan barely even comes on.

My son would be jealous.