Wow

[Terryl]

And that's a small statement....Just replaced the 1 TB old style hard drive in this PC with a new 1 TB SSD Plus drive from SanDisk...WOW what a change in performance, some of the larger programs that take some time to load up are almost instantaneous, others are instant, this compared to the old drive.

PC boots about 75% faster, most programs are so fast in loading I think I'm on a super computer.

I replaced the old drive on a whim, it is still working but I needed something to do, so Poooooof..out with the old and in with the new, glad I did.

New drive, a mounting bracket and the USB to SATA cable, all for 134 USD, not bad, and I'm now a very big fan of SSD drives.

 

[rolfw]

Added SSD to two PCs and a laptop, but relatively small ones, retaining the original drives as storage, did it this way, as SSDs are slightly more likely to break when faced with constant rewrites.

 

[4wd]

Regarding ssd longevity, many serious tests shows it's quite amazing > SSD Lifespan: How Long Does An SSD Really Last?

"One of the Samsung SSD 850 PRO drives achieved a figure of 9.1 petabytes of data written! That’s 60 times the TBW figure Samsung promises on their data sheets. The other Samsung product – the Samsung SSD 750 Evo – was able to write 1.2 petabytes of data, which equals (in theory) to more than 80 years of constant writing. "

Basically, seems one must be subject to some serious malchance or curse if one's ssd (with daily normal use) does not outlive it's owner by 50 years or so :O)

 

[Channel Hopper]

A few threads elsewhere (and a couple here) mention defragmenting is a no-no with SSDs.

 

[jeallen01]

FWIW, having put SSDs into 3x PC's, my take on the subject of SSD life is:
- Sometimes the cloning process goes wrong (dramatically on 1st occasion - HDD AND SSD totally trashed, and the laptop had to be totally rebuilt from "scratch" which was long and "painful") - Thus chose your cloning s/w carefully
- when it works, which is mostly, it makes a tremendous improvement in boot-up/app loading.
- letting the machine then "Sleep" seems likely to gradually contribute to full-life degradation - so I make sure that I switch machines fully OFF overnight (etc.) instead of that (or Hibernation)
- There are many manufacturers (or at least "brandnames"!) of SSD, and so I would not buy the "cheapest" "no-name" available, and only buy well-known brands like (in no specific order): Samsung, Sandisk, Crucial and Kingston (although it is said that there are a lot fake Kingston drives of other types on ebay etc.) from reputable sources (usually Amazon, but not their Marketplace) unless the PC is relatively "unimportant" - that said, maybe using a very cheap "no-name" SSD of an unusual physical interface type may well have resulted in the demise of the ACER N4620G nettop, and thus the need to buy the HP EliteDesk

 

[jeallen01]

A few further thoughts on SSDs:

- Keep an eye on the "health" of the SSDs: big name ones usually come with a dashboard App which allows you to check that, and/or use something like CrystalDiskInfo to do the checks as that should tell you how much time they have been switched ON (That's what told me that the Samsung drive in the main laptop had been for a lot of hours in only just over 1 year, and thus why I now switch the machines OFF rather than putting them to Sleep)

- I still do all my backups to large HDDs because: (1) they are still cheaper than equivalent-sized SSDs; (2) As backup devices, they won't get worked anywhere near as hard over time; (3) I have a lot of them!: some are (mainly) ex Sky Box (etc.) 2TB drives in one USB 4-bay unit attached to one NAS, and the others are Enterprise-grade 3TB drives (slightly used from an AV Forums seller, but I think I can expect a long life from them) in a similar USB 4-bay unit attached to a 2nd NAS in the garage for my "off-site" backup.

- Cloning: if you have a partitioned Primary HDD and the SSD doesn't come with dedicated cloning s/w don't try to use Acronis True Image if you only want to clone the Primary Partition because it's an "all or nothing" process and you can't select just that partition. OTOH, Macrium Reflect Free will do what you want.
.

 

[2cvbloke]

My laptop, gaming desktop and NVR/Plex server all have SSDs in them, the server has a Mushkin 120GB as the OS drive, the desktop has two SanDisks, one 480GB for OS & programs, 960GB for games and storage, and the laptop another Sandisk 960GB, the latter of which was an error in delivery and they never bothered to pick it up, so I kept it...

They're definitely worth getting to revive older computers, the server is a Core2Duo and flies along with the Mushkin (even though said SSD's speeds are actually quite slow now), and the laptop a first-gen i5 M520, that coupled with fitting decent amounts of RAM, they can keep on running for many more years to come...