Speed up your Computer with an SSD.

[Bsuds]

I know this will speed up a computer/laptop but was amazed at by how much.

My Son's Lenovo Laptop with a Ryzen 5 CPU, 8gb DDR4 ram and a 1gb HDD was painfully slow.

After checking all the things I know and could think of I decided to replace the HDD with an SSD.

$50 and 1 day delivery from Amazon Prime the 500gb SSD arrived and I tore the Laptop apart and installed it.

Took me less than 30 min and it was together and installing Win 11 from a usb boot drive.

Clean instal with no issues. All the updates are now done and it has gone from about 3 min boot time to less than 15 seconds.

Problem solved and everything runs faster.

If anyone has any doubt if it's a worthwhile update don't hesitate and just do it. It's really not that difficult and ca extend the life of your computer for many more years.

[Jlabute]

Certainly!

A platter based HD is extremely slow in comparison and is the largest bottleneck. No amount of RAM and no processor would give you an equivalent boost in performance.

There are few advantages to having a platter based disk. Those advantages would be probably life-span, and ability to recover data. Probably why security systems and servers still have platter drives. As always, make sure you do backups for anything important. I had a customer who was backing up a computer to another computer, a poor man's backup. When lightning hit all was lost and a hard drive recovery worked.

[spooker]

Wholeheartedly second this ... the only HDDs I have in the house are the archive volumes that I keep meaning to scrub and recycle ... SSD for the win! Started with swapping my RAID array for an SSD of the same size, ran an external backup for a couple of years just to be safe but gave that up a few years after it proved it's reliability

Five computers running SSDs and a few Raspberry Pis running on MicroSD cards ... though I still have my Osborne-1 with the 5.25" floppy drives but I think all the media for that is gone ...

It's nice to know that we can still work on our own computers as long as they're not Macs ...

[Bsuds]

It's nice to know that we can still work on our own computers as long as they're not Macs ...

I have probably done 4-5 Laptop HD replacements and this one was the easiest by far.

[Glacier]

HDDs are terrible. I lost all of my pictures when mine died. I had backed them up on an external HDD, and one of my kids dropped it on the floor, so when I went to get the pics off of that, it was also pooched.

SSDs are the only way to go. I now have two SSDs for back-up. They're fast and reliable. For the main computer, boot time is so fast. Most computer shops look at you funny if you want an HDD, and for good reason. It's like asking for a florescent light instead of an LED.

[TylerM4]

Spinning disc still has it's purposes but like everyone else has said, SSD is where it's at.

I stopped buying spinning disk over 5 years ago now unless it's for bulk low performance storage.

Be careful about perceptions of improved reliability tho. While an SSD does tend to be more reliable, RMA data still shows that SDD failures are common place, and a SDD is still the most likely component to fail in your PC/Laptop.

[Glacier]

I now have two SSD backup drives in case one fails. The good thing is it takes up such a little amount of physical space.

[Jlabute]

Interesting tidbit:

Not that it is enough to care about in a personal computer.

SSDs have a wider range of power draw (5 to 20 watts) compared to that of hard disk drives (5.7 to 9.4 watts), according to Scality's testing. Peak power consumption is also higher for SSDs. The firm shared data seen in the chart below.

Capture.PNG

[dg3]

Certainly!

A platter based HD is extremely slow in comparison and is the largest bottleneck. No amount of RAM and no processor would give you an equivalent boost in performance.

before the ssd, i used to run my os and some apps off a ram drive.
it was very fast,
so if u had a large amount of ram,
u could get ssd speeds.

[BlackMyth1]

Upgrading from a hard disk drive (HDD) to a solid-state drive (SSD) can significantly improve a computer's performance. Your experience with your son's Lenovo laptop demonstrates the remarkable difference an SSD can make, reducing boot time from 3 minutes to under 15 seconds. The process is straightforward and can extend the laptop's lifespan. Your success story encourages others to consider this cost-effective upgrade for faster and more efficient computing.

[rekabis]

There are a few technical wrinkles that people need to know with regards to SSDs in most computers.

• The transition of motherboards from traditional BIOS to UEFI (which are the primitive brain that bootstraps the computer, before Windows takes over) occurred in the early/mid 2010s. There are still many computers in use that make use of traditional BIOSes.
• There are two different types of SSDs:
  1. SATA, which leverages the on-motherboard drive controller hardware that traditional hard drives required.
  2. NVMe, which has controller hardware built into it, so it can connect directly to the PCIe data lanes of the motherboard.
• A traditional BIOS cannot boot an operating system installed on an NVMe SSD, it can only boot one on a SATA SSD.
• A traditional BIOS can still see and use an NVMe SSD, but only as a storage drive, not as a boot drive.
• There are four types interfaces (how you hook them into the computer) for SSDs:
  1. Traditional cable-based SATA (usually connects directly to the motherboard, but you can get PCIe RAID cards for them to create RAID arrays)
  2. M.2 SATA (gumstick style of drive, two notches on interface)
  3. M.2 NVMe (gumstick style of drive, one notch on interface)
  4. U.2 NVMe (looks like cable-style SSD, but with many more pins and is incompatible)
• An NVMe SSD of either M.2 or U.2 interface types connects directly to the PCIe lanes, which is why they cannot be used as boot drives with traditional-BIOS computers. But this also means that, traditional or newer, you can add an NVMe to any computer using just a simple ‘dumb’ PCIe adapter card. All this card does is make the appropriate electrical and data connections, nothing more.
• A SATA SSD of either traditional or M.2 interface types needs to be connected to controller chips in order to be recognized by the computer. Which is why motherboards come with traditional SATA plugs, or if you want to connect one to a PCIe slot, you need a more complex ‘non-dumb’ adapter card. This kind of an adapter card goes beyond electrical/data connections and actually includes controller chips.
• In general, SATA drives of any kind are limited to 550 Mbps due to the SATA spec, and the fact that it hasn’t been improved beyond that speed due to it’s obsolete status.
• NVMe drives are limited to the PCIe generation they were manufactured for, and to how high of a quality their internal controller hardware is built to. Theoretically, a Gen4 NVMe could reach speeds of up to 7,880 Mbps, but only the most expensive high-performance drives come close to this.
• Older computers can come close to NVMe speeds by setting up 4+ SATA SSDs in a RAID-10 array. This, however, usually requires special hardware in a PCIe slot in order to maximize that performance (RAID-5 and RAID-6 are massively inferior from a performance standpoint). Since this RAID setup makes use of SATA drives, it is equally as bootable as any individual SATA drive, only much faster than an individual drive.

[TylerM4]

There are a few technical wrinkles that people need to know with regards to SSDs in most computers.

Thanks for pointing that out.

In my experience: Most are buying M.2 or SATA SSD's. If the motherboard supports M.2, you'll be able to boot from the drive. If you need to buy/install an adapter card (NVME or M.2 on a MB that doesn't natively support it) that's when you'll run into problems booting from it.

Thus the simplified advice for many: Don't buy a drive you need to install an adapter/expansion card to make it work unless you've done the research and you're very confident that's what you need/want.

[rekabis]

If the motherboard supports M.2, you'll be able to boot from the drive.

There are plenty of early-model motherboards which do have an M.2 slot soldered to it, but this is a SATA slot designed for a gumstick drive with two notches, and cannot take a NVMe drive with just one notch.

Granted, you cannot force an NVMe M.2 drive into a SATA M.2 slot, but you still wasted money on the purchase, and now have the headache of having to conduct a return.

[Sadd00lettma]

I got the impression that SSDs are less durable than HDDs. I recently had my SSD fail after about 4 years of use, whereas my HDDs lasted around 7 years. Of course, the speed is incomparable, it's like night and day.

[rekabis]

I got the impression that SSDs are less durable than HDDs. I recently had my SSD fail after about 4 years of use, whereas my HDDs lasted around 7 years. Of course, the speed is incomparable, it's like night and day.

Your experience aside, SSDs are in fact far more durable than hard drives over the long haul. When properly installed they can handle drops and vibrations far better than any mechanical hard drive, they can handle a wider range of operating temperatures, and the NVMe connection (in particular) is far less likely to burst into flames just because it feels like it (unlike SATA power connectors).

They are not, however, more reliable -- they can only retain data for a relatively short time span when powered off (2-5yrs) before bit rot starts settling in. Plus, they need to employ something called wear levelling technology which ensures that writes are evenly spread around the entire device. Doing something like a zero-fill on an SSD, or using it as a high-speed cache, dramatically shortens it’s life. And SSDs are particularly sensitive to bit flips, where data can become corrupted by a stray cosmic ray or any number of other random things.