got a reminder of just how much faster a system is with SSD

philb2

[H]ard|Gawd
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Yesterday I decided to haul out and do a Windows 21H2 update on an old Lenovo T530 that I haven't used in years now.

The laptop has a 160 GB 5400 rpm HDD installed. Took like forever just to boot up. When I did the Windows 21H2 update, from the time I clicked on setup.exe, it was almost 3 1/2 hours until the system was updated. In contrast, on several systems with SSDs, the update took 40-50 minutes. For sure the CPU is slower than current systems' CPUs, but during the update, the drive activity light was on practically all the time.0

If this laptop wasn't a second-string backup system, I would need to install an SSD. :rolleyes:
 
Yeah I still get in "slow laptops/PC" from customers with HDDs in them. Had one this week that was bought in 2020...with an Optane setup (1TB 5400RPM + 16GB Optane). It was working but was sooo slow plus it was pretty messed up and corrupted. I managed to fix the errors, then used RST to uncouple the Optane drive, remove it, clone the HDD to a 250GB NVMe drive and slot the HDD back in as a blank storage drive. It now works like a 2020 4C/8T laptop should do.

How Intel thought to push Optane as a solution for budget PCs...o_O
 
I have an old hand-me-down 2.5" SATA SSD in some old HP laptop with an i5-580M for this very reason...it boots up faster than most desktops and updates are fast.
 
Yep... Ssd is an essential and they're very cheap nowadays (512gb for $40-50 is easy to find any day of the week ... I got an nvme 1tb tlc western digital drive for $64 shipped with free copy of BF2042 recently). I've seen 2tb sata drives as low as $105 and nvme for $130. Getting a small ssd for every system is a no brainer.

My first was a $750 drive I paid $480 for way back in 2008 (64gb slc). I sold it for a profit later and upgraded to an intel x25 80gb and went from there!

EDIT: Fixed phone typos.
 
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SSDs really are the easiest way to give cheap or older machines a new lease on life. I can't believe PCs still ship with spinners as a boot drive these days. With Win10 it's ridiculous.
With falling prices for NVMe drives, even traditional SSDs don't make sense. With an HDD, a laptop suffers from decreased battery life and increased weight. And for a desktop weight still matters.

HDDs only make sense for us data hoarder types, who have big libraries of music, videos, or photos.
 
HDDs only make sense for us data hoarder types, who have big libraries of music, videos, or photos.

Yeah I would say 98% of machines I get handed are using maybe 100GB or less of that super slow 1TB 5400rpm rusty. I have a large pile of wiped 1TB (and a few 2TB) 2.5" HDDs that were swapped for 120/250GB SSDs.
 
Yeah I would say 98% of machines I get handed are using maybe 100GB or less of that super slow 1TB 5400rpm rusty. I have a large pile of wiped 1TB (and a few 2TB) 2.5" HDDs that were swapped for 120/250GB SSDs.
daglesj Are you an IT guy?

I stilll have an unused 200 GB spinner, which I'm keeping mainly because I have space in one of my "stuff" bins for this drive.

So what does an IT department or IT consultant do with all those 1 TB drives? Strip out those very strong magnets? :ROFLMAO:
 
daglesj Are you an IT guy?

I stilll have an unused 200 GB spinner, which I'm keeping mainly because I have space in one of my "stuff" bins for this drive.

So what does an IT department or IT consultant do with all those 1 TB drives? Strip out those very strong magnets? :ROFLMAO:

Shrugs, Well they are handy for handing back data recovery jobs for those that do have more than 100GB of data. That's about it. I could stuff them all in a data server for some reason but energy costs now so... o_O
 
Shrugs, Well they are handy for handing back data recovery jobs for those that do have more than 100GB of data. That's about it. I could stuff them all in a data server for some reason but energy costs now so... o_O
Considering how much cheaper HDDs are now than say 5 years ago, why bother taking up a bunch of drive slots where just 1 drive purchased today has the same or much more capacity.

Me, I have all these old 1 and 2 TB drives. I change out my backup drive each January, and save the old backup drives as long-term backup, but I don't need backup drives from say 2016 or earlier. What to do with those now spare drives, when WD and Seagate have drives in th 18-20 TB range for a decent price. (Not that I ever buy Seagate any longer ...)
 
Considering how much cheaper HDDs are now than say 5 years ago, why bother taking up a bunch of drive slots where just 1 drive purchased today has the same or much more capacity.

Me, I have all these old 1 and 2 TB drives. I change out my backup drive each January, and save the old backup drives as long-term backup, but I don't need backup drives from say 2016 or earlier. What to do with those now spare drives, when WD and Seagate have drives in th 18-20 TB range for a decent price. (Not that I ever buy Seagate any longer ...)

Sorry...I still don't get you. Are you one of those people that appear on this forum that feels the more TB of data you have, the more impressive you are as a human being or something? Having lots of data is a millstone no one really needs in my opinion.

Hoarding masses of data is an illness. As I said most customers I deal with have under 500GB of data. Why would I copy their 200GB of recovered data to a 8TB HDD for them to just toss it in a drawer?
 
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Doesn't help many of the systems using spinners also have 4gb of system memory, making the system barely functional. An ssd page file is so much more usable than a hdd one.
 
Sorry...I still don't get you. Are you one of those people that appear on this forum that feels the more TB of data you have, the more impressive you are as a human being or something? Having lots of data is a millstone no one really needs in my opinion.

Hoarding masses of data is an illness. As I said most customers I deal with have under 500GB of data. Why would I copy their 200GB of recovered data to a 8TB HDD for them to just toss it in a drawer?
Well, I am a pretty serious amateur photographer. And like most "serious" photographers, I shoot "RAW" files. These days, RAW files, from Nikon,Canon, or Sony can easily be 50 MB or more. And some of these same cameras can shoot 10 frames/second for several seconds. So it's easy to have a catalog of multiple TB. Now, photogrpahers like me (who use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop) are a very, very small proportion of all camera users. It's a hobby and a source of satisfaction.

I know of users who have TBs of

I agree that hoarding data, like 6 year old backups, isn't particularly helpful.
 
Just put an old 128 GB SDD into an old laptop that used to have a 5400 rpm spinner. With the old spinner, boot up took minutes. With the SSD, just seconds. It's like that old laptop is now useable again.
 
Last 4 or 5 builds have been SSD's for primary and sometimes SSD for secondary or a large capacity Traditional HD.
 
I am moving away from having spinning rust in my system. I just setup a NAS for storage.
 
With falling prices for NVMe drives, even traditional SSDs don't make sense. With an HDD, a laptop suffers from decreased battery life and increased weight. And for a desktop weight still matters.

HDDs only make sense for us data hoarder types, who have big libraries of music, videos, or photos.
I still rock a 2.5 ssd raid 0 and yes it's larger and more wires but with a few in raid 0 I get to have a large drive with decent performance. Not worth it to sell and valuable enough not to chuck in the bin. Also if my few generation old MB doesn't have more than 1 nvme. M.2 slot there is no reason not to run a few in raid as the second drive. Access times all still very fast sometimes indistinguishable from an nvme drive.
 
SSDs really are the easiest way to give cheap or older machines a new lease on life. I can't believe PCs still ship with spinners as a boot drive these days. With Win10 it's ridiculous.
They got to clear out old inventory somehow, cause I doubt anyone is actually buying them from stores, so all the OEM get em dirt cheap and keep pushing em out.
 
I still rock a 2.5 ssd raid 0 and yes it's larger and more wires but with a few in raid 0 I get to have a large drive with decent performance. Not worth it to sell and valuable enough not to chuck in the bin. Also if my few generation old MB doesn't have more than 1 nvme. M.2 slot there is no reason not to run a few in raid as the second drive. Access times all still very fast sometimes indistinguishable from an nvme drive.
So long as you have backups of any important data, cause the only thing raid is giving you is more space vs any real performance in this situation, and far more risk.
 
Well, I am a pretty serious amateur photographer. And like most "serious" photographers, I shoot "RAW" files. These days, RAW files, from Nikon,Canon, or Sony can easily be 50 MB or more. And some of these same cameras can shoot 10 frames/second for several seconds. So it's easy to have a catalog of multiple TB. Now, photogrpahers like me (who use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop) are a very, very small proportion of all camera users. It's a hobby and a source of satisfaction.

I know of users who have TBs of

I agree that hoarding data, like 6 year old backups, isn't particularly helpful.
I am a pro photographer and I use two 4tb my books for backup and they are more than fine. But while working on the files they are on the nvme drive of course. Also I recently stopped taking gigs because honestly my weekend time is more valuable to spend with my family vs shooting other people's families so I'm basically over it at this point lol. Better as a hobby in my opinion like you so you can shoot when you want to shoot and not when it feels like work.
 
I am a pro photographer and I use two 4tb my books for backup and they are more than fine. But while working on the files they are on the nvme drive of course. Also I recently stopped taking gigs because honestly my weekend time is more valuable to spend with my family vs shooting other people's families so I'm basically over it at this point lol. Better as a hobby in my opinion like you so you can shoot when you want to shoot and not when it feels like work.
I am a long-time amateur, with maybe 3 GB of Nikon NEF RAW files, some CR2 files from friends, plus way too many JPGs from phone cameras. I have shot some events like my wife's company's Christmas parties and was an unofficial "second photographer" at some weddings and the like. Tons of photos that I should really clear out but that's too much trouble. My kids will eventually have to sort all this out. :ROFLMAO:
 
SSDs really are the easiest way to give cheap or older machines a new lease on life. I can't believe PCs still ship with spinners as a boot drive these days. With Win10 it's ridiculous.
I know someone who is cheap, cheap cheap to a fault. And cheaper on days when the moon is full. Last year this guy bought a mini-desktop from HP, slow CPU, minimal RAM, and a 1 TB spinner. Sheesh it was painful when he asked me for some help. I basically told him that if he wanted me to help (for free), then he had to buy a faster system with more RAM and an SSD. Of course, he refused. He hasn't talked to me since. :ROFLMAO:
:ROFLMAO: :ROFLMAO: :ROFLMAO:
 
Yesterday I decided to haul out and do a Windows 21H2 update on an old Lenovo T530 that I haven't used in years now.

Running windows 10 on a spinner is considered torture under the geneva conventions. I'm pretty sure Microsoft no longer tests this regularly, becuase it's awful. Windows 7 was much better on SSD, but spinners were ok... Once the system was done starting up and reading from all over, it would be fine. Windows 10 doesn't seem to ever finish doing little accesses all over the disk, so the disk queue is always full of things seeking everywhere and it takes a while to load uncached files (like executables, etc) and performance is trash. No big deal on an ssd, one at a time random reads are almost as fast as sequential reads and there's some amount of parallelism in dealing with concurrent reads in widely separated areas; but spinners can't handle it.
 
Running windows 10 on a spinner is considered torture under the geneva conventions. I'm pretty sure Microsoft no longer tests this regularly, becuase it's awful. Windows 7 was much better on SSD, but spinners were ok... Once the system was done starting up and reading from all over, it would be fine. Windows 10 doesn't seem to ever finish doing little accesses all over the disk, so the disk queue is always full of things seeking everywhere and it takes a while to load uncached files (like executables, etc) and performance is trash. No big deal on an ssd, one at a time random reads are almost as fast as sequential reads and there's some amount of parallelism in dealing with concurrent reads in widely separated areas; but spinners can't handle it.
Windows has a lot more cacheing and data compression algorithms going on since Windows 8 days. It's moving little bits of stuff around between RAM and storage a lot more. I think a lot of it was due to them wanting to compete with Chromebooks so it had to handle running with 32GB of storage and 2GB of RAM. Unfortunately, MS got it wrong when they set 32GB minimum limit for their cheap Windows laptop spec as there wasnt enough room to put new release updates on. Thats one screw up they don't mention much. Should have been 64GB minimum.
 
I think a lot of it was due to them wanting to compete with Chromebooks so it had to handle running with 32GB of storage and 2GB of RAM. Unfortunately, MS got it wrong when they set 32GB minimum limit for their cheap Windows laptop spec as there wasnt enough room to put new release updates on. Thats one screw up they don't mention much. Should have been 64GB minimum.

The laptops with the specs you describe, the "chromebook competitors", almost always come with Windows in "S Mode". Since "S Mode" means that you can only install apps from the Microsoft store, storage requirements are significantly less. I've upgraded many of these, since it's possible to convert from "S Mode" to a normal Windows Install. Some of them have rather strict requirements as far as what kind of drives you can install in them. The last one I upgraded, I used a 256G Samsung PM991, which is a very tiny M.2 SSD. Those drives are all over eBay for ~$20 each. Not exactly a budget-breaker.
 
my most recent run in like this was an imac with a fusion drive, holy shit are they slow! a basic macbook air could restart 4/5 times for its once.

The laptops with the specs you describe, the "chromebook competitors", almost always come with Windows in "S Mode". Since "S Mode" means that you can only install apps from the Microsoft store, storage requirements are significantly less. I've upgraded many of these, since it's possible to convert from "S Mode" to a normal Windows Install.
yup first thing to get from the app store on a S mode machine is the upgrade to home.
 
The laptops with the specs you describe, the "chromebook competitors", almost always come with Windows in "S Mode". Since "S Mode" means that you can only install apps from the Microsoft store, storage requirements are significantly less. I've upgraded many of these, since it's possible to convert from "S Mode" to a normal Windows Install. Some of them have rather strict requirements as far as what kind of drives you can install in them. The last one I upgraded, I used a 256G Samsung PM991, which is a very tiny M.2 SSD. Those drives are all over eBay for ~$20 each. Not exactly a budget-breaker.


Nah all the ones I get in are the HP 32GB ones that have soldered SSD/RAM. They are all in normal mode, not S and impossible to update. I have to copy the data off, rebuild and slot in a 128GB microSD and use that for the user data. They must have been pushed to the UK or something.

Thank god they dumped them.
 
The laptops with the specs you describe, the "chromebook competitors", almost always come with Windows in "S Mode". Since "S Mode" means that you can only install apps from the Microsoft store, storage requirements are significantly less. I've upgraded many of these, since it's possible to convert from "S Mode" to a normal Windows Install. Some of them have rather strict requirements as far as what kind of drives you can install in them. The last one I upgraded, I used a 256G Samsung PM991, which is a very tiny M.2 SSD. Those drives are all over eBay for ~$20 each. Not exactly a budget-breaker.
First time hearing about S mode. So you gotta watch out for this when buying a laptop. How can you easily tell?
 
Windows has a lot more cacheing and data compression algorithms going on since Windows 8 days. It's moving little bits of stuff around between RAM and storage a lot more. I think a lot of it was due to them wanting to compete with Chromebooks so it had to handle running with 32GB of storage and 2GB of RAM. Unfortunately, MS got it wrong when they set 32GB minimum limit for their cheap Windows laptop spec as there wasnt enough room to put new release updates on. Thats one screw up they don't mention much. Should have been 64GB minimum.
Yah. If Microsoft were smarter than it is, the Windows 10 and 11 installers should refuse to use a spinning drive for the OS. And tell all the hardware OEMs that they have to have a SATA SSD or better yet an NVMe drive as the minimum spec for any machine running Windows.

Friend of mine has Linux Mint installed on an SSD. He's real pleased with the performance of his system.
 
First time hearing about S mode. So you gotta watch out for this when buying a laptop. How can you easily tell?
Going to normal mode does not require to download some third party stuff or registry key, it is fully made by Microsoft for people to have the option to change for a regular Windows home (had some work from home co-worker that bought laptop with S)
 
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