Added an SSD over the holidays

Over the holidays I upgraded my main desktop. I added a Samsung 250GB 840 SSD and a Seagate 3 TB HD. All I can say is why did I wait so long. Using Photoshop and Lightroom is great. Just the overall performance is fantastic. Next upgrade will be the video card, but right now very happy with the upgrade.

I just dropped an SSD into a laptop for a faculty member at school. His laptop now boots from cold to Windows login in 18 seconds. Killer speed. My desktop at home has a similar setup to yours. SSD for OS and apps, and mirrored 2TB drives for storage. Now I need a better vid card and some updated monitors.

I know I need to get one. Still running good 'ol HDD.

Once you get an SSD, it's very hard to go back to a HDD.

RHChan84 wrote in post #16605406
Once you get an SSD, it's very hard to go back to a HDD.

Definitely. I'm in the middle of the transition right now and booted off the SSD for the first time last night. It really makes a difference at startup when a million things are all competing for disk access. Unfortunately the cloning software I used mis-aligned the sector boundaries so I need to do it again with different software. I was sure sweet for the 10 minutes or so I used it though.

Another perspective. I had 4 PCs with an SSD as the boot drive. I felt as many, why did I wait so long. Over the last 3 months, 3 of the 4 failed and when they go... they really go. All SSDs were recoverable after a format but all the data was lost. (had backup so not a big deal, but a real pain in the arse.) I've gone back to a regular drive for now. They are more forgiving in a failure mode.

That is what I am afraid off too. I do have all my photos backed up and my media backed up. I still have the original HDD from when I have my laptop. I think I used my laptop for about 2 weeks before I went SSD. I will just have to reinstall all my programs.

gjl711 wrote in post #16605448
Another perspective. I had 4 PCs with an SSD as the boot drive. I felt as many, why did I wait so long. Over the last 3 months, 3 of the 4 failed and when they go... they really go. All SSDs were recoverable after a format but all the data was lost. (had backup so not a big deal, but a real pain in the arse.) I've gone back to a regular drive for now. They are more forgiving in a failure mode.

I've found that to be true of flash in general. When it goes, it just GOES. I do nightly image backups of my C drive to the NAS so I'm pretty well protected, except for some downtime needed to get a new drive and restore the image.

mike_d wrote in post #16605479
I've found that to be true of flash in general. When it goes, it just GOES. I do nightly image backups of my C drive to the NAS so I'm pretty well protected, except for some downtime needed to get a new drive and restore the image.

I use to do them weekly, but after the first one went, I started backing them up daily. Restoring them was not an issue, just time consuming, but it's just such a pain in the butt.

I'm wondering if there is a way to check the health of the SSD, to be warned of upcoming problems?
I also use SSD with HDD.

I did have some warning. I would start getting read errors from time to time, a few a week. When the drives failed, one just would no longer boot and the other two simply froze mid edit. Had to reset and then they would no longer boot. When I took the drives out and put them into another machine, they remained unreadable. I re-formatted one and it is still in use as a paging/temp drive and still working. It's been a few months. I'm thinking of putting the other two back into service as well.

trailguy wrote in post #16606157
I'm wondering if there is a way to check the health of the SSD, to be warned of upcoming problems?
I also use SSD with HDD.

About all you can do is keep an eye on the SMART data. If the reallocated sector count or uncorrectable error count starts to ramp up, its probably on its way out.

Got mine re-cloned and aligned properly. Its just a little faster than the hard drive it replaced.

Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB

Wow, I can't believe those speeds. Almost double my speeds. I have the first generation Sandisk Extreme. I am looking to upgrade to the Samsung 840 series once the price goes down a bit more.

I just aligned my SSD. It's probably just a placebo effect but it seems snappier. The whole time, I thought my SSD was aligned, but it wasn't.

I used AS SSD Benchmark to measure my system and to check if my SSD was aligned. It wasnt.

Then I used Mini Partition Wizard to align my laptop. Took about 70 minutes for a 480 GB SSD with no data lose.

I go from hitting power button to having FIrefox open in 28 seconds.

Regarding the speed, my SSD is connected to a SATA3 port. If you only have SATA2, you'll be capped at about half that. Still way faster than a hard drive.