Got an SSD - anything I should know?

[tek-monkey]

I have a nice shiny Crucial M4 sat at home, and I'm going to install windows 7 professional on it. Anything I should be aware of? I know I need to swap the BIOS to AHCI, but is that it?

 

[tek-monkey]

I should probably add I'm running it on SATAII, as I have a fairly old motherboard (5 years old I think). I'm assuming this will half my performance

 

[Alan B'Stard]

The only thing I can tell you is that I am very jealous.

 

[pollyannapatch]

Stafford GUM clinic
Mid Staffordshire General Hospitals
Stafford District General Hospital
GUM Clinic - Sexual Health Clinic
Weston Road
Stafford
ST16 3SA
Phone: 01785 230260 or 0800 696669
Fax: 01785 230 261
Website: www.gum.nhs.uk Opening times
WALK-IN CLINIC
Monday: 8.30am - 7pm
Tuesday: 8.30am - 5pm
Wednesday: 8.30am - 7pm
Thursday: 8.30am - 5pm
Friday: 8.30am - 5pm

APPOINTMENTS ONLY
Monday: 8.30am - 7pm
Tuesday: 8.30am - 5pm
Wednesday: 8.30am - 7pm
Thursday: 8.30am - 5pm
Friday: 8.30am - 5pm


Seriously though, make sure you back up regularly, cos when they go, they go! Getting more reliable but nonetheless....

 

[wmrcomputers]

No real experience of high end SSD's as of yet, only low speed unreliable jobbies that acer used in earlier netbooks.

Let me know how you find it please, tek.

 

[bobbles31]

I have a OCZ Vertex 2 and it rocks, I have a 3 year centrino 2 laptop that for everyday use is now as responsive as an i7.

Windows installed an absolute breeze in about 15 minutes, from start to finish and now MS Word/Excel et al open as quick as notepad used to.

As far as Windows is concerned it is just an ordinary disk drive.

The only issue I have had was that I installed Windows 8 preview on a Bootable Virtual Hard Disk Partition and that ran into difficulty after about a week. The VHD became corrupt but the SSD remained fine so I lost the WIN 8 install but my Win 7 PRO install was perfectly ok (THough I did have to reinstall the WIN7 bootloader). This is quite an exotic thing to do and could have been as much to do with the Alpha build of Windows 8 as it could have been to do with the SSD.

All in though it has worked flawlessly I spent half what I would have spent on a new Laptop and feel llike I have a new laptop.

DO make sure you are backed up though, SSDs don't wear out and slow down like Platter drives, they don't make weird noises they just stop working completely and they cannot be recovered following a failure.

Some of the more modern ones can switch to a Read Only mode following a failure but even still it is best to be ready for failure.

Depending on what you do, Dropbox (or one of the other cloud stores) is your friend in this respect.

 

[wmrcomputers]

An excellent first post there bobbles!!

I'm sure you're already a master of backing up anyway tek, but if you'd rather have the process automated remember I do unlimited cloud backup for just a quid a month (which you can try free for 3 months)

 

[tek-monkey]

Mate, you wouldn't want my backup! My server is at 4.5Tb and counting, all legit images of OS's obviously and no pirated TV series whatsoever. Although I may be interested in the backup for my GF, does it have the ability to synch across computers? Would be nice for her to be able to photograph stuff at work and easily access it at home.

bobbles31, thanks a lot. I'm installed but found the installation slow, I'm on SATAII but expected better. Windows updates were slow too, but steam games came in quick. The thing is if I upgrade I need to replace mobo/cpu/ram, and whilst a few years old my system isn't too bad at present (AMD Phenom x4 9600)

 

[wmrcomputers]

Mate, you wouldn't want my backup! My server is at 4.5Tb and counting, all legit images of OS's obviously and no pirated TV series whatsoever. Although I may be interested in the backup for my GF, does it have the ability to synch across computers? Would be nice for her to be able to photograph stuff at work and easily access it at home.

UNlimited means unlimited mate - but even with virgin media's fastest upload speed I should imagine 4.5TB would take quite a while to upload

As for the GF she may be better off with dropbox if 2gb would serve her. My backup accounts don't sync they're just backup. I can do a 500GB briefcase which sync's across PC / MAC plus iphone apps etc., but they are £4.95 per month with a £15 one time set-up fee (£1.99 per month extra per 500gb on top of that)

 

[citricsquid]

I have a 240GB Vertex 2 SSD in my pc and it's nice. Thing about SSDs though is I constantly run out of space, programs nowadays are becoming more and more space hungry so I have to make a point of shifting files over to my storage drives every now and again. May need to upgrade to an even bigger SSD soon, if they exist.

 

[UltraSBM]

I've got a Crucial C300 256Gb SSD and have had it since June 2010.
After using it in my Desktop PC I got so used to the speed of it, I hated using my Laptop.

I finally bit the bullet and purchased another SSD - this time the Crucial M4 256Gb SSD - and I can tell you it's even better!

I would say that putting it on a SATA-II interface is bad, but it's not the throughput of device that makes it fast, it's the Access Times.

The only things I would say are:

1 - Well done on the Crucial M4. The Sandforce-based ones have some common issues regarding Blue Screens Of Death (I think they are sorted now however!)
2 - Back it up
3 - Only put the Apps you use all the time on there
4 - Back it up again
5 - Don't waste space by putting films and music on it - use the Platter-based tech for that!
6 - BACK IT UP!

 

[Jonah]

Talking about backing up. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my Mac's hard drive. It does an exact copy so I can boot from it if needs be. Is there such an application for the world of Windows?

 

[UltraSBM]

A few HD manufacturers give away Acronis on their website...so if you have a WD drive you can install and run the WD version, and I believe the other HD manufacturers do something similar as well.

 

[citricsquid]

I used clonezilla and had great experience with it, free and easy to use.

 

[wmrcomputers]

I have a 240GB Vertex 2 SSD in my pc and it's nice. Thing about SSDs though is I constantly run out of space, programs nowadays are becoming more and more space hungry so I have to make a point of shifting files over to my storage drives every now and again. May need to upgrade to an even bigger SSD soon, if they exist.

Due to the cost of these things, most people install their operating system and "memory intensive" applications to the SSD, and have a slave hard drive (regular type) for document storage and less important / rarely opened stuff.

For example, why store a 1gb movie on expensive ssd, when it play's just the same from a slaved 40 or 50 quid hard drive.

 

[citricsquid]

I have a 240GB Vertex 2 SSD in my pc and it's nice. Thing about SSDs though is I constantly run out of space, programs nowadays are becoming more and more space hungry so I have to make a point of shifting files over to my storage drives every now and again. May need to upgrade to an even bigger SSD soon, if they exist.

Due to the cost of these things, most people install their operating system and "memory intensive" applications to the SSD, and have a slave hard drive (regular type) for document storage and less important / rarely opened stuff.

For example, why store a 1gb movie on expensive ssd, when it play's just the same from a slaved 40 or 50 quid hard drive.

Yeah, that's what I do:

+ 2 x 2TB in my NAS, but like I said, lots of applications take up a lot of space now. I have over 25GB of cache data from chrome and other applications, 20GB of system files, 50GB of program files (just operational things, not stuff like videos, images) and it's growing every day. I store all my music and downloads on other drives.

 

[wmrcomputers]

blimey.... 50gb in programs is quite heavy. And I thought that I was bad!!!

 

[bobbles31]

I have a 240GB Vertex 2 SSD in my pc and it's nice. Thing about SSDs though is I constantly run out of space, programs nowadays are becoming more and more space hungry so I have to make a point of shifting files over to my storage drives every now and again. May need to upgrade to an even bigger SSD soon, if they exist.

Due to the cost of these things, most people install their operating system and "memory intensive" applications to the SSD, and have a slave hard drive (regular type) for document storage and less important / rarely opened stuff.

For example, why store a 1gb movie on expensive ssd, when it play's just the same from a slaved 40 or 50 quid hard drive.

Agred, I was lucky, when I bought my Laptop I hadn't realised that it had space for two internal drives. This has allowed me to have the 240gb Vertex II wight just the OS and dropbox on and a seperate Hybrid Drive for the second drive, this is a normal Platter drive combined with a small SSD. So the platter is 500Gbyte and the SSD is 16Gigabytes (IIRC). The drive is mart enough to move regularly used files to the SSD portion. So for commonly used files they access much quicker than rarely used files.

I am a developer for my sins, so I keep my Source files on this drive (backed up to GitHub), and 16Gigs is a lot of space for source files and of course overtime the Drive moves my more active source to this portion anyway so the projects that I am working on daily I pretty much have SSD speed type access to.

 

[wmrcomputers]

That sounds like a good bit of kit. If the price of them isn't too bad i might look into getting one of those myself if they're still available

 

[bobbles31]

The laptop itself is a three year old hp pavillion dv7 i think it is an ea5030 or some such. The kids are playing with it at the moment otherwise I would check and be sure.

It is a 17" display with a full keyboard and numpad. A tad heavy to lug around but since buying it I have added the two new drives and up'd it to 8gigs of ram and tbh at the moment I daren't trade up because it is so good.

It cost me £849 new but I dare say they are probably cheap as chips now on eBay.

If you do see one make sure it has the t9400 centrino in it. There is a variant that has the p9600 centrino which is designed for extended battery life ao is less powerful and also has half the l2 cache.

P.s. if you need it for photography don't bother. The one thing that is rubbish is the screen, it is far too red. I use an external screen with it so it doesn't bother me.