[Handsome Creepy Eel]

I am the proud owner of a laptop with an SSD (well and i7 processor and 8 GB RAM too ) as well. The thing is just blazing fast. I could never go back to a normal HD (especially the 5400 rpm crap). The only downside is the low space available (for a reasonable price), but since I'm not a person who torrents and stockpiles terabytes of movies and music, I don't feel it at all.

Best 100$ I invested lately.

[Spike]

I bought this one when i was in LA in 2013.



A 13'3 inch Lenovo convertable ultrabook with touchscreen and Intel i5 and 128 ssd. I fucking love it and I don't even use the touchscreen or the folding function. It's lightning fast.

It was very cheap also compared to Dutch prices. I paid about 750 euro for it. When i returned home a couple months later I saw them for 1200 euro! It's one of my best purchases ever.

The 128 ssd harddrive is big enough for every day work and downloading. I have my music on a separate 32G Sd card which is stuck in the side of the laptop.

[Menace]

I have a Crucial SSD, no problems. Been thinking about the MacBook conversion. I have one similar, if not identical, to OP with a 120 MB HD. Buy your stuff from Newegg. Absolute best bang for your buck. You should keep your archival stuff (porn, movies, etc.) on a NAS anyway.

[Parlay44]

Mine blew up after 3 months and I lost a shitload of work files. Unrecoverable.

[Alpha_Romeo]

I just discovered MP3s. Can I store them on these new SSD drives you guys keep talking about?

[kaotic]

Shit I picked up one of those razor thin dell laptops from work, for FREE.

They were tossing shit out and this laptop was "dead" because the HD didn't work.

Threw in a Samsung 128 ssd and it fired right up.

I'd build another rig that's water cooled, but there's no point.

I don't play video games anymore, I'd only use it to stream movies online or work remotely.

It's a bit depressing I wont be geeking anytime soon OC'ing a Radeon card or i5 processor but I'd rather be fucking a girl while streaming movies then playing video games and jacking off.

[kaotic]

(05-08-2015 02:31 PM)Parlay44 Wrote:  

Mine blew up after 3 months and I lost a shitload of work files. Unrecoverable.

Some used to take a shit like the OCZ ones, Samsung and Intel have always been reliable, but I always synced important files with an extremal hard drive or thumb drive.

[Fast Eddie]

(05-07-2015 07:14 PM)kbell Wrote:  

240 gb ssd here pc master race. I mention this in another thread probably close to a year ago. For your porn stache and games I put them on regular hard drives. I don't think SSD are that cheap yet for TB sizes yet. 400 bucks. So not as cost effective for that yet. I have a hybrid SSD/disk platter for my games which is pretty damn fast.

I feel like an idiot. My understanding was always that in order to run programs, they must be installed on the same drive as the OS. How can you play games installed on a HDD if your OS is installed on the SSD?

I have a brand new Lenovo Y50 with I7, 8GB RAM, and 4GB Nvidia 860GTX. The hard drive is an utter piece of shit though. It literally hangs every X seconds, because apparently the manufacturer had the brilliant idea that the drive should suspend itself automatically to conserve life, even if you're in the middle of watching a video, typing in a word processor, etc. So imagine this: every 150 seconds or so, the drive will just go kaput, the computer will freeze for a split second, and I'll hear a pronounced whirring sound as the drive spools back to life before repeating the process 150s later. It's absolutely fucking maddening and whoever designed this system and pushed it to market in a premium laptop should be shot in the balls and thrown to a pig sty.

Now that I've finished venting, the point is I have to replace this drive. I was considering going the SSD route, but even expensive ones provide a paltry 256GB. Once you subtract OS space and basic necessities like Office etc, you're left with basically no space for additional software. Modern software suites are massive hard disk hogs. Are you guys saying it's possible to run programs off of a secondary HDD and dedicate the SSD to just the OS and the most commonly used applications?

[Parlay44]

You can install programs anywhere. Just choose a custom install path when you first install them.

I used to have a 128gb ssd as my OS drive and msata 500gb as my main storage drive in my laptop. I kept all my media and backups on the big drive and ran my programs from the ssd for speed. It was a nice setup.

Check out the new Asus laptops. They have dual ssd drives that you can run in raid0 for even more speed. Craziness.

[kbell]

Nope you could partition the SSD drive as well with at least 40 to 80 gb for just the OS and essential programs. Games run fine off of the extra hd although they would be faster on an SSD. The problem is that most games nowadays are close 30 gigs or more. So that's why secondary drives work better. Laptops you not getting much games on it period.

As for your laptop check your power settings that could be why your hd drive is throttling. OR its a low RPM model which is often the base drives they give before you have to pay more for upgrades. I'm sure its a setting issue. You might want to check out a notebook forum for similar problems in the same model.

It looks like the vents are on the bottom which is a little strange, so you may have to elevate your laptop. If it overheats it might throttle too.

[DVY]

Get a smaller SSD for boot-up, windows and intensive processes. 128 gb should suffice. Then get a standard 1-2TB HD for storage.

[Americas]

(05-08-2015 04:50 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

Now that I've finished venting, the point is I have to replace this drive. I was considering going the SSD route, but even expensive ones provide a paltry 256GB. Once you subtract OS space and basic necessities like Office etc, you're left with basically no space for additional software. Modern software suites are massive hard disk hogs. Are you guys saying it's possible to run programs off of a secondary HDD and dedicate the SSD to just the OS and the most commonly used applications?

I don't see how this is possible. I run Windows 8 + basic applications (Office, itunes, VLC, maintenance/malware) + skype/utorrent/converting applications + a bunch of statistical software + a bunch of files in various formats for about 120 GB. What applications exactly do you want?

You should be able to run any normal set of applications easily under 200 GB. Windows 8.1 is only 20 GB for 64 bit and that's one of the biggest applications/OS out there.

[Mr. Cameltoe]

Ever since having bought a MacBook Air back in 2011 which had a SSD I just never looked back. A spinning hard disk drive is the obvious bottleneck in today's computers. Currently I'm using a 13" (Retina) MacBook Pro with 512 GB and this is the first laptop I haven't upgraded on an annual basis. Bought it in 2013 and I'm still more than satisfied.

I still use hard drives for mass storage though and have currently five of them crammed into my Drobo.

[kbell]

windows 7 wastes a lot of space by default on system restores or backups. I forget which. It should only be 10% at most if more it can easily steal half of your drive. And that half won't show up on the computer part saying where those missing gigs are.

[Fujiwara]

Upgrading my netbook by maxxing out the RAM and changing the HDD for a SSD made it a whole new machine.

[YossariansRight]

(05-07-2015 04:42 PM)kaotic Wrote:  

Samsung has been pretty good to me, shit they'll throw in a free game also.

^^Samsung is very good. I have a Galaxy 3 phone that needed repairing and when none of the local places would touch it, I called Samsung (Plano, TX); they repaired it, including labor & shipping for less than $100.

I'm very impressed with their customer service.

[BagelConsultant]

I put a 128GB OCZ in my 6 year old HP Desktop. It's like a completely different machine. The key is having backups, personal NAS drives are so cheap now that there's no excuse anymore. My current storage setup:

Internal:
128GB SSD (boot drive/apps)
1TB HDD (Primary storage)

External:
1.5TB NAS (full backup of all internal storage plus I have a bunch of movies on here)

Storage is silly cheap these days, a 4TB RAID home NAS can be had for under $300 from Newegg, etc...

[kaotic]

^^^You never had a problem with OCZ ?

I had 2 of their SSD's and they both took a shit within 3 months, they had HORRIBLE reviews on newegg for awhile.

Looks like they fixed the problem.

I have 3 Samsung SSD's, I swear by them, however I wouldn't mind getting an Intel one.

[DJ-Matt]

And OCZ went bankrupt so Toshiba bought the name I think.

I put a cheap 128 GB OCZ refurb drive newegg sold for $40 in a 7 year old computer, despite being only SATA II it sped that thing right up. Computer only does SATA I though so that don't matter. It's still running strong after almost 2 years, although there is no diagnostic utility for it so I can't see wear levels or life left like I can on the Intel 330:

   

[kbell]

Life remaining? The tool tells you when it will fail? Mines a samsung and I don't believe it has a tool like that.

[samsamsam]

Slight tangent, but what free program do you recommend to clone an HDD?

I'd like to clone all my programs including OS, so in case the drive fails, I can just pop open my backup, drop it in and fire it up.

I have googled and looked around on Tom's but value this community's opinion. Thanks.

[BBinger]

(05-16-2015 12:43 AM)samsamsam Wrote:  

Slight tangent, but what free program do you recommend to clone an HDD?

I'd like to clone all my programs including OS, so in case the drive fails, I can just pop open my backup, drop it in and fire it up.

I have googled and looked around on Tom's but value this community's opinion. Thanks.

The interface takes some learning, but the unix dd utility is great for cloning drives.

[DJ-Matt]

(05-16-2015 12:43 AM)samsamsam Wrote:  

Slight tangent, but what free program do you recommend to clone an HDD?

I'd like to clone all my programs including OS, so in case the drive fails, I can just pop open my backup, drop it in and fire it up.

I have googled and looked around on Tom's but value this community's opinion. Thanks.

Macrium Reflect is free and great. Plus the bootable media maker utility allows you use use various versions of WinPE in case you're cloning on old hardware (Vista, Win7 or Win8 codebase).

I liked Macrium a lot more than old Symantec Ghost which I don't think is produced anymore. It lets you provide drivers at boot up so you can clone with add-on disk controllers or SD cards, examples:

1. My Dell PowerEdge server's PERC RAID card drivers so it can see the array
2. My Lenovo tablet so I can back up the partition to an SD card, also Macrium is the only software I found that makes a UEFI BIOS boot stick for the newer devices that do not have legacy BIOS support at all.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx



http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display...scue+media



Also depending on which SSD you buy they sometimes come bundled with free software to help you move from the spinner to the SSD. My Intel came with Acronis Disk Director.

[Tigre]

(05-16-2015 12:43 AM)samsamsam Wrote:  

Slight tangent, but what free program do you recommend to clone an HDD?

I'd like to clone all my programs including OS, so in case the drive fails, I can just pop open my backup, drop it in and fire it up.

I have googled and looked around on Tom's but value this community's opinion. Thanks.

I'm going to use this guide for the switch over:
http://lifehacker.com/5837543/how-to-mig...ng-windows

It suggests EaseUS Todo Backup Free as the disk cloning utility.

[BBinger]

(05-09-2015 01:22 AM)Americas Wrote:  

(05-08-2015 04:50 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

Now that I've finished venting, the point is I have to replace this drive. I was considering going the SSD route, but even expensive ones provide a paltry 256GB. Once you subtract OS space and basic necessities like Office etc, you're left with basically no space for additional software. Modern software suites are massive hard disk hogs. Are you guys saying it's possible to run programs off of a secondary HDD and dedicate the SSD to just the OS and the most commonly used applications?

I don't see how this is possible. I run Windows 8 + basic applications (Office, itunes, VLC, maintenance/malware) + skype/utorrent/converting applications + a bunch of statistical software + a bunch of files in various formats for about 120 GB. What applications exactly do you want?

You should be able to run any normal set of applications easily under 200 GB. Windows 8.1 is only 20 GB for 64 bit and that's one of the biggest applications/OS out there.

I seriously have to wonder if you *need* Windows, MS Office and the 30+ GB it burns.