SSDs

[Mr.Blonde]

So I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a ssd in a sale, it's been a while since I've done it so is there any easy way to reinstall windows without losing everything in a completely clean install? Obviously I don't necessarily have to format my current drives but any way to not have to reinstall all the windows updates / programs again? (windows 7 this is)

Thanks!

[larchy]

Just copy the drive onto the new one. Get Acronis TrueImage, or if you don't want to pay/acquire it then something like Seagate Discwizard will probably do.

[Mr.Blonde]

muchos gracias!

[feign]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/06 ... ice-crash/

£170 delivered for a 256Gb Samsung that people are raving about is silly.

[Squigg]

Hmm I'm tempted to buy another one now and stick my 128GB into the aging laptop...

[Cacker]

Hoeree cwap .. the 256 GB version of the crucial I have is now £144. I'm sure it was £300+ yonks ago !

The samsung you referred to is £149.99 at ebuyer.

rinky dinky

[Klors]

I seem to remember them starting out at close to £1 per gigabyte when we were first discussing them, then the tsunami and some other effects pushed the price up to around £2 per gigabyte.

[Cacker]

Yeah, I think tk got the 256 just before the hike .. and then it hit circa £450

I paid around £105 for my 64 GB M300 and now it's £144 for 256 GB. gits.

[Cannon_Fodda]

What's the best SATA 3 256gb SSD for around the £120-150 price range at the moment?

Going to bung it in my MacBook Pro, not that it should make a difference.

Seen several OCZ Agility, Petrol, and Octane drives, as well as a Samsung that fits the price bracket, not entirely sure how the read/write performance is affected by iops, but I assume higher numbers on all is better?

[DrKazza]

these guys recommend the samsung

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buyers ... may-2012/5

[Cannon_Fodda]

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/comp ... n=products

I think this one suits my budget then

[Cannon_Fodda]

Got it today and installed it earlier. This thing fucking flies!

[The-Bandido]

Now using one of these hybrid drives, works well:
http://www.dabs.com/products/seagate-50 ... ard+Drives

(Seagate ST95005620AS)

[The-Bandido]

Any thoughts or experience with SanDisk? Looking to get one of these - for £40 it's a no-brainer:
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/comp ... g-g25.html

[Klors]

In the SD card and CompactFlash market I'd have nothing but good things to say, no idea with their SSDs though.

[feign]

New SSD's incoming from Samsung it seems - http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11 ... le-whammy/

[Tonster]

I'm looking at buying my first SSD, or more accurately demanding it from Santa. I'm a total n00b with these though so just wondering if there's anything flawed in my logic below in terms of buying and installation considerations. My current set up is;

Asus P5K Premium PCI-E, SATA 2, ATX Motherboard
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB SATA-II 32MB Cache

T'other stuff FWiW
4GB Patriot DDR2 RAM, E8400 CPU, Win7
Radeon 5850
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
Patriot 2GB DDR2 800Mhz Extreme Performance Memory x2
Win 7

I know I'll only get 3gb SATA throughput but that's OK, Tom's Hardware reckons the gains in load speed are still significant. Also I intend to put the OS and Steam on it and little else, load speeds just don't matter to me anywhere else. Apparently I have to set the drive mode to AHCI on the BIOs, fine no problem.

For £160 the 256GB Samsung 840 seems to be the one for me, but I've not fitted one before. I need to get a holder/adaptor for my case (Antec P182) to can hold the drive. Amazon's got a bunch SSD holders, but I don't know which one will fit. Any suggestions?

Anything else I need to think about that I've missed so far? [edit] ooo, just thought need to check available power connections.

Not looking forward to transferring Steam and the OS, I must have 70 games installed Might have to do a little house cleaning. One thing I've not worked out is how to move Win 7 from the current HDD without totally buggering everything like MS Office etc.

[larchy]

The 840 would be the one I'd go for (I'm actually getting a 256 840 Pro soon). The 830s have been solid and excellent all round choices. I'd much prefer them over any Sandforce drives. A m8 has been running one for a while, replaced his old Crucial M3.

There are two versions of the 840 - the normal one which uses cheaper TLC NAND which has lower endurance and lower write speeds. These have 3 year warranties.

The 840 Pro has more conventional MLC NAND and therefore faster write speeds and longer endurance. These have 5 year warranties. The Pro also has stupendously low power use - 0.068W max compared to 2.42W max for the 840 (in line with most other SSDs), not that this is a big deal for a desktop system.

Both drives use Samsung's MDX controller, an updated version of the 830's MCX with three ARM R4 cores, so perform just as consistently as the 830s.


For you the normal 840 is probably going to be best given that you won't benefit fully from the relatively minor (in the great scheme of things) performance increase between the two models due to SATA300 (although the normal 840's IOPS etc are slightly lower anyway.... and yes the gains are still night and day tremendous). The normal 840 will be much cheaper. The only real difference to you would be if you wanted to pay for the 5 yr warranty, probably not worth it given the prices we're talking.

I'm assuming you're going to put the new drive in and install Windows afresh, and just leave the old one in as a second drive. I'd put the new drive in, change to AHCI if it's not already running in this mode, then put Windows on. Don't change to AHCI mode after install as Windows can be funny about the storage controller changing and end up BSOD'ing on boot.


Standard SATA conectors so data/power are all the same as the drives already in.

Can probably sellotape the thing to the drive bay or something. No moving parts, very light, don't even really need to be secured if you're not moving your PC around.

[Cacker]

SSDs afaik are all 2.5" form factor, so you use any standard disk bay 2.5" > 3.5" converters if you are installing it in a disk cage (which are 3.5"), or if you are installing it to a normal bay (that would hold your DVD ROM drive etc), these are 5.25".

You pick these up online at maplins, ebuyer etc etc.

SSDs are so light though, I had mine just dangling off the end of the power cable for a good while

[Tonster]

I'm assuming you're going to put the new drive in and install Windows afresh, and just leave the old one in as a second drive.

Having been reading up on migrating Win 7 to a different drive, but from all I've read it's not worth the trouble, fresh install it is. Only question I have there - is it OK to leave the same Win 7 OS on the old drive but boot from the SSD?

Standard SATA conectors so data/power are all the same as the drives already in.

I'm just not sure I have any spare connections from the power pack When the PC was built Yoyotech did a really neat job, no spare cables anywhere!

SSDs are so light though, I had mine just dangling off the end of the power cable for a good while

Sounds like my type of a PC build!