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An SSD for Your Current Computer May Save the Cost of a New One (Video)
Obviously, the first performance enhancement you do on any computer you own is max out the RAM. RAM has gotten cheap, and adding more of it to almost any computer will make it faster without requiring any other modification (or any great skill). The next thing you need to do, says Larry O'Connor, the founder and CEO of Other World Computing (OWC), is move from a "platter" hard drive to a Solid State Drive (SSD). Larry's horse in this race is that his company sells SSDs, mostly for Macs. But he's a real evangelist about SSDs and computer mods in general, even if you buy them from NewEgg, Amazon or another vendor.
A big (vendor-neutral) thing Larry points out is that just because you have a Terabyte drive in your computer now doesn't mean you need a Terabyte SSD, which can easily cost $500. Rather, he says, all you need is a large enough SSD to contain your OS and software and whatever data you're working with at the moment, so you might be able to get by with a 120 GB SSD that costs well under $100. Clone your current main drive, stick in the new SSD, and if your need more storage, get another hard drive (or use your old one). Simple. Efficient. And a lot cheaper than buying a new computer, whether we're talking about home, business or even enterprise use. (Alternate video link.)
A big (vendor-neutral) thing Larry points out is that just because you have a Terabyte drive in your computer now doesn't mean you need a Terabyte SSD, which can easily cost $500. Rather, he says, all you need is a large enough SSD to contain your OS and software and whatever data you're working with at the moment, so you might be able to get by with a 120 GB SSD that costs well under $100. Clone your current main drive, stick in the new SSD, and if your need more storage, get another hard drive (or use your old one). Simple. Efficient. And a lot cheaper than buying a new computer, whether we're talking about home, business or even enterprise use. (Alternate video link.)
YEAH WE KNOW
Soo this is Slashdot, not "Mom Computer Consumer Weekly".
Almost every failing of a computer can be related to where the OS sits. I have replaced/installed over 50 new/used computer platters with SSDs as the primary and a platter as the storage. Not only does boot time vanish, but just about everything under the sun is improved. I could ramble on but I think that's what the video does. Basically it's just smarter regardless of whether you use Win/Mac/Linux etc.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Most laptops don't come with the ability to put in two drives so you can't have an SSD and platter. You'd have to have an external USB drive which most users would not want to lug around.
Many people I've known with 128GB SSD run out of space fast. I'd recommend at least 240GB. Another option for light users would be a hybrid SSD.
Put the 64GB in and use it as a ramdisk. Be blown away by the speeds.
clone tools exist and no one needs to 'ask MS'.
worst case, you find a copy of windows 'loader' and you're done.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Hyper-Duo! It's not a comic book! It's a nifty technology that allows one or more SSDs to be coupled to a standard HDD and treated as a single drive! Hi! I'm Troy McClure....
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
People keep saying crap like this, but it's nonsense. I hate MS as much as anyone, but a lie's a lie. I've never once had to reauthorize Windows (XP or 7), even after replacing or adding hard drives. Hell, I've changed the motherboard a couple of times and it didn't complain.
It depends on your use case. If you just surf the web and do email then no, you don't need to max out. I often run multiple VMs while also compiling code, etc. The more RAM for me the better.
They may have fine SSDs, but the ones I bought to add to 2 mac minis were ridiculously slow for SSDs. Around 80 MBps read/write according to BlackMagic's disk speed test. Not faster than the original normal drive that came with the machines. In one of the Mac minis, I replaced the OWC with a Samsung, and it's much faster (I forgot how much, but certainly over 120 MBps).
So in conclusion, yes, SSD may improve performance, but only if they are fast SSDs. Some aren't and won't make a big difference. (and when they fail, they tend to do so without warning and completely, so be sure to always have backups).
Yes, because Windows makes it oh so easy to move user profiles to other volumes.
For Linux users, it's really easy:
mount -o rw /dev/sdb1 /mnt/tmp /home/. /mnt/tmp/home /home #to make sure everything moved. /dev/sdb1 /home (ideally, add ,acl to enable access control lists)
mv
ls -lh
mount -o rw
. . . then add it to fstab to make it permanent.
On Windows, each user has to go to each individual folder and move it - and only lets you move certain folders. To do it globally it requires registry edits, which Joe Sixpack will inevitably screw up.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Uhh...not exactly. In fact, his subsequent logic about why lots of people don't need terabyte magnetic disks applies directly to this point about RAM. If your system supports 16GB of RAM but all you ever do is browse the web and check email then you almost certainly don't need to max out your system's RAM. In fact, you could probably make do with 4GB.
The historical reason to max ram within 18 month of purchase is that's when it's easiest and cheapest to do, at least retail. A few years back, was looking for ram for a 6 year old system (not that I bought a cpu/motherboard type that just came out either, mind you, so add 2 years to that for model age) and it was pretty much impossible. Places that had it charged way more per/gb than ram for recent systems. Could either waste time on craigslist salvaging old computers or take chances on buying used on the shitbay.
Though I agree, now max ram on many systems are passing actual need. Something that started around mid-00s for some low-end users and is spreading upward.
Unless you're rendering or the like, the bottleneck now is internet connection.
SSDs aren't actually very good for caching. (Though they sell drives and software specifically to do that.) They're better at WORM (Write Once Read Many) or Write Rarely Read Many (WRRM?) tasks. Like installing an OS and other programs there and not modifying them often. (Where "often" = "every few minutes".)
That said, I do have my computer's swapfile on my SSD. But only because I only have 4GB RAM and can't upgrade.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Use it as a ramdisk for what, though?
If you want general OS and application usage, you'll have to copy over all the data from your main disk first, which is going to take some time, and if anything changes, you'd need to sync it back to your main disk, which will take more time, and you're at risk of losing data if you have an unexpected shutdown. An SSD is way better for that kind of task.
It's completely unsuitable for any kind of long-term storage, of course.
You could use it for temporary files for applications like Photoshop... which is a good use of it, but very situational.
Using it as a swap disk would just be silly when you could just deactivate the ramdisk and have all that RAM again.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
This is a non-issue. It takes a lot more than a new harddrive to make it re-activate. And even then, it will almost always let you re-activate using the original key. And on the rare chance that it doesn't calling the 800 number has always got me back in business.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
"Obviously, the first performance enhancement you do on any computer you own is max out the RAM"
What kind of clueless moron wrote that nonsense?
Well, you're wrong. 4GB is enough for almost every average user. Gamers need 8GB but no game I've ever heard of uses more than 5GB of total space while running. 16GB is basically video editing only. So no, don't max out the RAM just for the fun of it. Going from 4GB to 8GB won't do a thing for you if all you do is web browse. It would have absolutely zero impact on performance at all.
The only company I've ever had to contact for authorization from "installing too much" was Apple to activate iTunes. Microsoft hypothetically has a limit, but given the number of times I've reinstalled I'm pretty sure they only keep records going back a certain amount of time.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
This post probably deserves an off-topic mod. I know. With that out of the way...
I'll admit, since my comment on the last video, I've been curious what the next would be like. Roblimo, I don't know if you saw or cared about my comment, but I notice that this story is far better. As of this writing, there is not a single comment complaining about advertising, even though there's still only a single company directly involved. The focus is more general, and that makes the whole thing much more appealing. Kudos to you. It makes me happy to think that I might be improving Slashdot in some small way.
Granted, the subject is a bit under the typical Slashdotter's level of expertise, but that's beside the point. This would have been really nice when I was explaining to a former boss how SSDs should properly be used. He thought I was crazy for suggesting that the documents he wanted to have instant access to should be on the slower drive.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
+4 insightful. Only on Slashdot. Let's analyze this...
You know every computer has a built in RAM disk. It's called cache. You should read how it works. Then you'll see why no one does this.
I'm actually embarassed for you, /.
wth..
I tested and windows had no substantial improvement booting from SSD, nor working on my usual apps. Windows must do a lot of writing during boot compared to most OS.
The biggest difference is in Vista. Every other Windows shows less improvement. Windows is actually really good at optimizing boot, since XP at least it will even defrag and relocate files for boot optimization.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, I'm glad that someone's out there talking about it, but here on /. it really is preaching to the choir.
That being said, I'd love to see this video get sent out to the masses of people on some major news channels. Getting a couple million more people interested in upgrading and modding their own computer would do wonders for increasing the interest of computer parts manufacturers in catering to the upgrade/modding community.
Z
It's kinda amazing how the idea having to call someone to basically beg for access to your operating system is seen as acceptable. People really are able to get used to any amount of bullshit it would seem, even if it's "rare". It's not as if it's necessary in the first place, what with Windows loaders being able to permanently activate anything up to and including Windows 8.1 with a single exe.
...
Pretty much everyone with an SSD as their primary will disagree with you, and they'd be right.
On a second look at your post ... I realize now you're either completely ignorant of the subject matter at hand, or a shitty troll.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I beg to differ. With enough tabs open in the browser, frequently run out of memory with 8GB.
Yes, but that is because browser writers write sloppy, leaky code. I have 6 tabs open in Firefox right now, and it is using 629 MB. That is completely unnecessary. The entirety of the text displayed in those 6 tabs could be done in probably 16k. Add in memory for the firefox core and some other things, and you probably bump it up to needing 8 MB or so.
I would be schocked, though if firefix could manage to use 8 GB of memory before it collapsed under it's own weight, which it seems to do often enough on mine before ever hitting 1 GB.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.