SSD Upgrade, Wow!

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Nick1994

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I've got a 9 year old MacBook Pro that hadn't been performing all that well, and would take 2 minutes and 20 seconds to turn on and display my icons. I found a good deal on Slickdeals for a 240gb HP SSD for $40, I decided to give it a try and see how it performs. I reinstalled Mac OSX and while not a record breaker for turning on, it now takes about 25 seconds. Opening programs is lightning fast, there's no hesitation. I was completely blown away.

I've also got a cheap ASUS laptop, it's 5 years old and was around $329 when new. Not a fancy laptop at all. It got so slow, it was crawling. Booting up took forever, programs weren't working well etc. My Disk utilization in task manager was 100% for a couple years with no programs running. I rarely ever use this laptop because of how slow it is, but I decided to try out another cheap $40 240gb SSD. I installed it last night and WOW. I am speechless by how fast it is. It takes 12 seconds to power up and display my icons. I can open Chrome right away and have no delays at all. Before I'd have to click Chrome and wait. Then try again after 30 seconds and wait. Then try again and maybe it would open it, and then the other 2 would also open.

So if anyone has been thinking of upgrading to an SSD, do it!

Here's the link to the SSD in the Asus https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076XXMJZH/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

And here's a video of the startup of the cheap ASUS and opening Chrome.
 
SSD's are great. Especially the ones with 3D Nand. I'm a big fan of the Samsung EVO series. They are great for boot drives.
 
It was the best investment I made in a while for one of my laptop computers. The difference was night and day.
 
All it takes is one. I'll never buy another hard drive.

I also convinced our IT group here at work, to start buying our company Dell laptops with SSD's.
 
Originally Posted by StevieC
SSD's are great. Especially the ones with 3D Nand. I'm a big fan of the Samsung EVO series. They are great for boot drives.


Actually, 3D nands are "slower" than 2D, but they are cheaper so they can make it bigger. Newer SSD with cheaper NAND can afford more bells and whistles to make them faster.
 
3D is just a marketing term for TLC memory.

All my PCs have a SSD. It is a great upgrade.

memory.PNG
 
SSD's are fantastic, I have them in all my rigs now and they are my choice when deploying a unit at the office. The employees are delighted by the speed, battery life and durability.
 
I've been wanting to do this on an old Dell. What do you use to transfer the OS and programs on the original HD to the SSD?
 
My current PC has Samsung 512GB M.2 SSD for OS and programs and a 1TB SATA SSD for personal files. Transferring my personal files from an HDD to an SDD was overkill but having image previews and files load up faster was worth it. It does get backed up periodically to a networked hard drive just in case my SSD failed (and I had a couple fail, remember those Indilinx SSD's.)

10 years ago you had to dope out a lot of cash for a decent sized SSD or suffer from capacity anxiety. Had a couple cheapie 32GB OCZ Vertex/Agilty SSD's and a balls to the wall Intel X25 160GB SSD that was $450 back then.
 
Originally Posted by RW1
I've been wanting to do this on an old Dell. What do you use to transfer the OS and programs on the original HD to the SSD?

I'll post the link below. I clicked "Download tool now" and copied it to a USB drive, it was the easiest thing. This gave me a fresh copy of Windows 10, once I booted to the USB with the new hard drive it installed everything and I ran updates. It authenticated my product key on it's own since I originally got Windows 10 with a download. You might need your product key, depending how you got Windows 10.

I manually installed my programs afterwards.

But you can buy an adapter for $10 or so to plug your new hard drive into your computer and mirror over your old hard drive.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
 
I just used Macrium Reflect Free and a USB to SATA cable to copy FIL's spinning disk to a cheap SanDisk 240GB SSD. His crappy Toshiba came alive.

I use the same to make backups of the house PC's, and also use a two-drive HDD dock to make copies to cheap, large HDD's. In the event of a drive failure, a 'cloned' drive just plugs in place of the bad drive, and you're up and running.

Those of you running Adobe products for photography would do well to consider a second SSD for the OS and Adobe swap/cache files, too.
 
Thanks! My laptop came with Windows 8.1 and I took the free upgrade. I guess we'll see what happens! Thanks again.
 
Originally Posted by PandaBear
Originally Posted by StevieC
SSD's are great. Especially the ones with 3D Nand. I'm a big fan of the Samsung EVO series. They are great for boot drives.


Actually, 3D nands are "slower" than 2D, but they are cheaper so they can make it bigger. Newer SSD with cheaper NAND can afford more bells and whistles to make them faster.


I didn't say they were faster. I just said the 3D nand are great and that I was a fan of Samsung EVO. Any SSD 3D Nand or not will be a big improvement over a conventional HDD.
 
I have a PCIe M.2 SSD in my Ryzen home desktop and in my Lenovo X1 Carbon at work. >1,000MB/sec speeds is crazy.
 
Originally Posted by redhat
I have a PCIe M.2 SSD in my Ryzen home desktop and in my Lenovo X1 Carbon at work. >1,000MB/sec speeds is crazy.


I have one in my Plex Server as the boot drive. They are blazing fast.
 
Originally Posted by StevieC
I didn't say they were faster. I just said the 3D nand are great and that I was a fan of Samsung EVO. Any SSD 3D Nand or not will be a big improvement over a conventional HDD.


I like the Migration Tool and Samsung Magician software. Makes it easy to clone drive, monitor health, update firmware, and tweak things for a family member's computer.

Samsung Download - Tools & Software

For myself I am running a few Micro Center Inland 120 gb SSDs. Working great with Windows 10 in a Optiplex 760. Bought one Monday for $22.99 + tax. It is nice prices have come down so the performance vs price is hard to beat.
 
Yeah their tool is pretty good. I've used it once. Usually when I'm replacing with an SSD the drive has already kicked the bucket so no migration is needed other than restoring files from my backup.
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I'm on two years with the 1tb Evo 840 in my mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro. It's one of the best things I ever did to the computer, although now I've "regressed" somewhat and now also have a 2tb spinner in the computer. The latter is used only for storage-I boot and run programs off SSD. BTW, for anyone contemplating doing this-just remember that you should put your SSD in the optical drive bay and your spinner in the regular hard drive bay-I think on 2010 and newer MBPs, both run at SATA 3 speeds, but the optical bay doesn't have a sudden motion sensor.

Since the 15" is a heavy beast, I put a 500gb Evo 860 in my late-2011 13" MacBook Pro just a few weeks ago. That particular Mac was my first(and the only Mac I've bought new) and actually had one warranty hard drive replacement. I don't know whether the HDD was going bad or if I've just been spoiled, but it felt nearly unusable. With the SSD and 8gb of RAM(not 16gb as in my 15", and with RAM prices where they are now I don't really want to spend the money to upgrade it) it's once again perfectly usable and pleasantly fast. I'm going to go back to taking it with me when I'm traveling, even though I'll miss the screen on my 15".

All of my other main computers have SSDs. The Mac Pro 1,1 in my office runs off a cheap 256gb Kingston, which is generally a terrible drive but it's been ticking away for the past 3 years and the computer has rarely been turned off in that time. My Mac Pro 5,1, on which I do a lot of heavy photo work, has two Apple OEM PCIe SSDs-one from a MacBook Air and the other from a "trash can" Mac Pro 6,1. I run OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard(legacy reasons) off the "trash can" drive, which is the larger of the two. Admittedly that's a bit of a beast of a computer(32gb RAM, dual hex-core 3.06ghz processors, Radeon 5770 GPU) and for lightweight stuff it seems to almost read my mind in Snow Leopard. It's no slouch in High Sierra either(unfortunately, at this point High Sierra is the end of the road for me on that computer without losing Snow Leopard compatibility).

I pretty much only do Macs, but I've put SSDs in a lot of computers-I've stretched as far back as PowerBook G4s both for me and for other folks(I usually don't do them in PowerPC desktops since all but the G5 are ATA and 7200 rpm desktop drives are a decent match for an ATA 100 or 133 bus. For G5s, 7200rpm desktop SATA drives are even faster and not that many SSDs play that nicely with the SATA 1 bus). I've never had a person disappointed after I installed an SSD. The last one was a 2011 iMac that-again-the owner had written off as unusable and it got a new lease on life. I've put a LOT of them in late 2007/early 2008 MacBook Pros(3,1 and 4,1) along with 2009 MacBooks(5,2) and those now-inexpensive computers once again become perfectly usable for anyone who doesn't need a ton of CPU horsepower.

BTW, I've gone several routes when installing a drive. I use to be a heavy user of Carbon Copy Cloner, but now, often as not, just use the "restore" function in Disk Utility to clone the old drive over provided that it's readable. Of course, if it's not readable but still will spin up I can often get it in good enough shape to clone with Disk Warrior. For a computer that's still carrying the "baggage" of a 10+ year old OS X install, I'll often start clean and use Migration Assistant from the old drive for even better results. Then, of course, if it's a computer that I got "clean" or want to have it that way, I'll just toss a fresh OS X/macOS install on the new drive and install anything that needs to be installed.
 
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