Thinking of installing an SSD mainly to speed things up on windows?

martin57

gjchester wrote: »

Check with Acronis's web site, its not as simple as just putting the image to the new drive. There are underlying changes that may mean it won't work without changing drivers or settings under the hood.
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Thanks a lot for reply. Well I would just try and install my acronis backup to the SSD first, if that goes ok, I would just restart my existing windows on the HDD (configured using EasyBCD) and use EasyBCD to point to the SSD to see if it boots into that ok.


Hopefully it would, anyone see any flaws in this method?


Thanks
Martin57

kwikbreaks

Things SSDFresh offers to turn off in addition to auto-defrag

Windows indexing
File access timestamps
Prefetch
Windows event logging
8.3 name creation

Turns on if not already..
Trim (if ssd supports feature)
AHCI (default for SATA)

It also offered to turn off system restore but I declined that as I have had the need to use it occasionally.

You'd need to google exactly what some of those are and how to manually make the settings. I doubt that any other than trim and AHCI make any big difference.

Cycrow

Just a slight correction, not all SSD's are 2.5"
you can get 3.5" version of some, like the OCZ Vertex drives.

on one computer i mounted the drive to the side of the drive bays with cable ties

prowla

I have one machine with a 3.5" to 2x 2.5" adapter, and have an SSD and laptop size HDD in there.

I have another smaller computer, and I've replaced the DVD drive with a caddy, so I've got an SSD and a HDD in there. (I then have a USB DVD drive, which I plu ing if needed.)

enfield_freddy

2 x 120 g + 2 x 2.5 to 3.5 adaptors ordered this afternoon from scan for Monday delivery (for a customer) £91 inc P+P


personally I would dump a cd drive , or buy a new card reader (usb, lead internal or cable thru to back skt)


the partition tool proggy I mentioned , is built for cloning to SSD.

martin57

Thanks for replies everybody, at the moment on this 5 year old amd 3000 quad core it probably takes up to 2 mins for hard drive to settle down after restart, I have disabled everything that I don't need for bootup in windows, will I be able to knock 50% off the startup time I wonder.


Loads of 250gb (want that size because I want to partition it for two windows installations) SSD's about I believe that Samsung are one of the better SSD's. Anyone got a good deal on a 250gb from them?


once again thanks
martin57

globalds

It will be a pleasure to boot up once you change.

In my opinion it is the most rewarding simple change you can make to a computer. I have a pretty old Vaio with an ssd in now at home ..boot up is still amazing ..
I just got a new i5 laptop for work ..it has a standard hard drive ..I feel I have gone backwards when I turn it on at work.

enfield_freddy

I have a machine here , intel g3220 , 4g memory , asus h81 m/board , it is in a home theatre case and running openelec , its not being used now , replaced by an intel nuc ,


somebody asked me if I wanted to sell it , so I grabbed an old 250g h/drive and stuck win 10 ion to show them it worked.


took about 2 mins to boot and the drive was still flashing , os un useable for about another 90 secs.


I pulled the ssd out of my own desktop , same h81 , but i3-4170 and 16g with win 8 on


booted and fully functional within a minute


PS win 10 is normally faster than win 8

Ben84

SSDs speed up many things, for example start up time/shut down time, opening and loading of large files and programs. However, they don't help with slow internet browsing, and once a program/file is loaded in to memory the speed difference doesn't seem significant in most cases. They're a good way to improve a computer's speed, but they're not the only option and only apply to certain tasks. Still, I really like my SSD and would buy it again.

They generate minimal heat and make no noise.

Generally, as the number of gigabytes on the drive go up so do the read and write speeds. With an older computer however, I wouldn't focus too much on this as I expect other factors will limit the speed before this becomes an issue. The price per gigabyte tends to go down as the drives get larger too, but there's still no benefit to buying more than you'll need.