I've been missing out...

A recent 2TB HDD failure forced me to reevaluate my situation,
and I decided to buy a Samsung EVO 860 250GB SSD for a boot drive, and use HDD for the rest.
I've never used an SSD before.
The problematic drive is disconnected while I research ways to extract data from it.

In the wait time, I chucked an old 80GB laptop drive into the system to install
Win7x64 and some other programs as a boot-only drive.

The drive arrived today, and I used a Linux boot environment to use "ddrescue"
to clone the temporarily-used drive. After expanding into the unused free space
left behind by the cloning process, within Windows, all is good.

The good stuff:
Windows boots EXCEPTIONALLY FAST! from a SSD.
Boot times used to be measured in minutes, even bare-bones new OS installations.
Boot time can now be measured in SECONDS after the system BIOS gives it over
to the boot device. Literally.
Windows doesn't even get to play out the startup animation sequence
before I'm presented with the login.

Cloning the 80GB drive took about 30 minutes, from a rather old SATA drive.
3GB/s SATA to 6GB/s SATA is a fairly impressive rate for the clone, in my estimation.

Amazingly-fast program startups:
There is almost no delay with anything instigated from this drive.
The monitoring and antivirus and add-ons I use no longer take longer to load
than the Windows GUI. Google Chrome web browser opens up instantaneously.
System functions such as Control Panel and Disk Management and Dispaly Properties
show up in a flash. ATI/AMD Radeon settings are shown within a second,
when it sometimes used to be in a "Not Responding" state for several minutes
after the system had been up for a while.

The bad: Nothing, yet.
Longevity will be an issue sometime down the road, though I suspect SSDs and flash memory
in general will improve in reliability and read/writes by the time I'll be needing to replace this SSD.

All in all, I'm just amazed by the difference between a SSD and a HDD.

SkedAddled wrote in post #18774452
The good stuff:
Windows boots EXCEPTIONALLY FAST! from a SSD.
Boot times used to be measured in minutes, even bare-bones new OS installations.
Boot time can now be measured in SECONDS after the system BIOS gives it over
to the boot device. Literally.
Windows doesn't even get to play out the startup animation sequence
before I'm presented with the login.

All in all, I'm just amazed by the difference between a SSD and a HDD.

Nothing particularly new here. Many people have been saying for a few years, ever since SSD's started to fall in price, that there is no singular change you can make that affects computer performance as much as the swap from HDD to SSD.

Yeah. Thanks, John.

If you'll notice in my post, I mentioned that I've never used SSDs before.

Even so, it's great to have a "bah, humbug" player in the court, all the same.

SkedAddled wrote in post #18775743
Yeah. Thanks, John.

If you'll notice in my post, I mentioned that I've never used SSDs before.

Even so, it's great to have a "bah, humbug" player in the court, all the same.

The early use of bah, humbug was Scrooge saying "Bah! Humbug!", declaring Christmas to be a fraud. I'm not declaring anything here a fraud, use of an SSD as opposed to an HDD, is probably the most beneficial thing you can do in terms of improving performance. It can also be exceedingly easy to accomplish the migration. Some of the newer laptops that use an M.2 format drive can be a challenge, but it is doable.

I certainly wasn't trying to suggest you were hollering fraud about anything.
In my context, it was simplay as a nay-sayer or party-pooper, which I now believe
was also not your intent.

Also, it seems there are adaptors being used for M.2-to-SATA desktop applications,
as those turned up in my search results during my purchasing quest.
Heck, the same is even available for CF and SD cards.
I've a current Linux "rescue" boot on a USB 2.0 thumb drive which is also even faster
than a spinning HDD, which I'm trying to enable with a persistent memory,
for a theoretically greater chance of success in retrieving data from the failed HDD.

SkedAddled wrote in post #18776325
Also, it seems there are adaptors being used for M.2-to-SATA desktop applications,
as those turned up in my search results during my purchasing quest.

Be cautious of adapters for M.2. That is a project I'm currently faced with and many of the adapters get very bad reviews because they simply don't work. I have to emphasize that project is for something very specific; cloning my M.2 256 GB drive onto a 500 GB or even 1 TB drive for a laptop. In contrast cloning SATA drives are quite easy; I've done dozens using the cable that Samsung supplied (about $10 extra) with a drive I purchased about 5 years ago. The cable enabled connecting the SATA drive to a USB port, everything was cloned to the drive, then the old and new were physically swapped. I always cite the first time I did his on a Dell D630 laptop running Win XP. The boot time went from about 2+ minutes down to about 20 seconds!

On doing an M.2 drive it seems as though many people support cloning the existing M.2 drive to an external SATA drive, then install the new (and larger) M.2 into the laptop, then clone the SATA back to the new M.2 drive. Simple enough, just takes time.

If you are upgrading a desktop, just get a SATA 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch drive bay adapter. Clone the old drive to the new SATA, then install the new drive into the desktop with the adapter bay. Again, easy to do, just takes time, much of which is dead-time while things are copied old to new. Most brand name drives come with migration software and there are some 3rd party software packages as well.

No worries; I've no interest in doing anything with M.2,
as I don't own anything using it.
Just thought I'd throw it out there for anyone interested.

SATA-to-USB, I've got covered, both ways.

Already did the migration from desktop HDD to SDD, as mentioned in my initial post,
which also mentions the use of a 3rd-party Linux utility for cloning.

Maybe you're trying too hard to convince me, John.
My needs in this are already covered for what I have and use,
and have been successfully implemented.

My only concern now is the abovementioned desire to implement
a persistent memory within the bootable USB drive, in order
to potentially increase my chances for a successful recovery
of the malfunctioning drive.

SkedAddled wrote in post #18776355
My only concern now is the abovementioned desire to implement a persistent memory within the bootable USB drive, in order
to potentially increase my chances for a successful recovery of the malfunctioning drive.

Not sure what you mean by this choice of words, especially since your are referring to a "Linux "rescue" boot on a USB 2.0 thumb drive" or am I reading the sentence structure incorrectly.

John from PA wrote in post #18776499
...am I reading the sentence structure incorrectly.

No, I'd imagine you've got it right.

What I'm trying to do is enable a persistent memory on this bootable USB drive.
This would allow saving changes to the bootable setup to remain in place,
even after a shutdown.

My reason for this is to maintain a logfile on this USB media, which is then referenced
by the Linux ddrescue program. This allows interrupting the process at any time,
with the ability to resume at the point of interruption.

Unfortunately, I'm not adept with *nix OSes, and information for doing so
seems to be outdated on the source's website despite fairly recent
version of download(s) available.

You mention longevity of the SSDs, this article will be a fun read for you, and it was written in 2013.
https://techreport.com …-ssd-endurance-experiment

Bleufire wrote in post #18778941
You mention longevity of the SSDs, this article will be a fun read for you, and it was written in 2013.
https://techreport.com …-ssd-endurance-experiment

An interesting read, Bleufire. Thanks for posting that link.