Adding an SSD or hybrid

[kilted]

Just wondering what the up to date recommendations are for this? Looking to give my system a bit of a speed up.

 

Really would prefer not to have to do a clean install (too many programmes with too many updates).

 

Desktop has a 1TB drive currently which IIRC (at work atm so can't check) has about 500-550GB used between Windows, other programs (photoshop CS4, games, office etc) and data (about 300GB) of photos and music).

 

Is it possible to clone the OS and programs over but leave the data on the existing (and have it purely as a data drive)?

 

Also, assuming I have cloned the system/programs over to the new drive, I assume I will have to remove the redundant OS files from the data drive to allow the space to be used.

 

I should know this but my previous experience swapping discs out has always been a like for like (due to a catastrophic failure where everything was lost) or on a new system where the existing HDD was simply added to the machine I had newly built.

[Aspman]

Hybrids are a bit niche and expensive.

 

I'd whack in a decent SSD big enough for the OS and a few other things and keep the spinning rust disk for storage.

 

I've seen a few offers on HotUKDeals in the last week for 256Gb SSDs for under £80.

 

When Win10 is released I'm going to put in an SSD at that point.

 

I think you can clone across but not sure what you'd use. Often it's better to start from scratch if you have the time.

Edited 1 May, 2015 by Aspman

[Phil-E]

I would highly recommend doing a clean install on an SSD.

 

Then removing all the redundant files from your HDD to then use as file storage.

 

That's what I did with mine.

 

Phil

[AlanRHB]

Many companies offer cloning software to do just what you want Kilted, which just copies leaving your data on the original HD .... you should then be able to plug your old HD into a spare SATA and power socket on the Mobo... if the 1TB not regognised, then an external drive case, USB or Firewire would also allow you to use it for data storage.

 

Alan.

[dbg400]

Fitting an SSD makes a huge difference. I've just upgraded my laptop from the Dell supplied WD Blue 750Gb drive to a Samsung EVO 850 250Gb (£80 from Amazon). I was only using 180Gb of the original drive, so was able to use the included software to clone the C drive to the SSD. I just plugged the SSD into a USB caddy and set the software going on a lunchtime and swapped the completed drive over that evening - I don't know how long the cloning took. It now boots to the login screen from power-on in around 9 seconds, and shuts down as fast.

 

I built my current PC 18 months ago using a 64Gb SSD just for the OS (Linux - clean install) and all the user files (copied back from the old machine's drives) are on a pair of 2Tb drives, and that convinced me - apps just open instantly. The SSD status still indicates zero degradation of the storage capacity after that time, so hopefully it should last as long, or longer than the old spinning disks.

[samuir1974]

I've been running a hybrid on my laptop for 12+ months, aSeagate 750gb that performs reasonably well.

 

BUT.... i have not seen all the gains i hoped for; but certainly maintained the overall storage for data/music/pics etc.

 

So next chance i get.... i think SSD is called for and prices at the moment look competiitve

[pinkpanther]

As above really, I recently replaced the main drive in my PC with a SSD. Huge difference in boot up time and generally seems much more responsive in day to day usage. Best bang for buck upgrade I ever did!

 

I did a bit of research at the time best practice seems to be a clean install of the OS on the SSD.

 

I then re-used the existing drive(s) purely for bulk storage of mainly media files etc.

[Immelmann]

SSD's will give you a huge speed boost for sure and Ive seen the hybrid configuration on sale.

Try "gimage x" on either a bootable cd or a bootable usb stick, will copy the whole contents across so this will cause a bit of faffing about. Good idea to get yourself a large usb hard drive to take regular backups too.

[lesmond]

One of the best thing I done was to change to ssd for my main drive, I cloned my stuff to it, but got rid of most of the things I didnt use first.

[Aspman]

 Good idea to get yourself a large usb hard drive to take regular backups too.

 

That's a  good call. you don't want anything precious on an SSD without backing up. You don't get any warning before they go pop and everything goes together on them.. Probably not feasible to recover anything from them either.

[JohnMcL7]

That's a  good call. you don't want anything precious on an SSD without backing up. You don't get any warning before they go pop and everything goes together on them.. Probably not feasible to recover anything from them either.

 

I agree with you about SSD's (every one I've seen failed has been completely unrecoverable) but I'd extend the advice to cover hard drives as well which can also fail without warning losing everything on them.  Although data can be recovered on a hard drive I find it tends to be when the hard drive has had a physical impact and is failing which is where an SSD wouldn't have an issue whereas when the hard drive fails itself it's normally not possible to get data back without pricey data recovery which I find most people won't go for.

 

John

[AlanRHB]

Have you experienced many SSd's fail John...  I have a fairly old laptop which I upgraded to Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0Ghz and 6Gb of memory running Win 7 Pro which I take with me when away from home. It is a reliable old thing and does everything I need including a little photo, video rendering ect... an SSD would probably give it another new lease of life, particularly as they become cheaper, but your comment about failures worries me.

I do keep backups of data from my logical/storage partitions on external HD, as well as the most recent OS partition on which no data is ever stored with the relevant rescue CD... but as you say, hard drives can also fail.

 

Which media to store important data long term on is a problem.. I have found DVDs which become corrupted in time, and wonder now about the longetivity of flash media as a long term storage solution ?

We can look at photos and read books that are 100 years old if they have been stored properly... will future generations have access to digital media 100 years from now ?

 

Alan.

[Richf]

The best mod i did was adding a ssd for the OS and keeping my old HDD for file and program storage .

[dbg400]

We bought a bunch (100+) of Dell laptops at work around four years ago, all with 128Gb SSDs. In that time I think only three or so SSDs have actually failed. When the previous laptops were that age we were getting two or three a month back to have drives replaced, and that number seemed to be going up.

 

The Samsung Evo I've just bought comes with a 5 year warranty, which is better than any HDD drive I've had. I just try to make sure any data I'm concerned about is replicated across other drives and other machines - I gave up on using DVDs for archiving after too many failed to be readable after only a few years. I lost the primary drive on my desktop system a few years back, and all I ended up losing were some videos & music that I was able to re-rip from the original discs again.

[JohnMcL7]

Have you experienced many SSd's fail John...  I have a fairly old laptop which I upgraded to Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0Ghz and 6Gb of memory running Win 7 Pro which I take with me when away from home. It is a reliable old thing and does everything I need including a little photo, video rendering ect... an SSD would probably give it another new lease of life, particularly as they become cheaper, but your comment about failures worries me.

I do keep backups of data from my logical/storage partitions on external HD, as well as the most recent OS partition on which no data is ever stored with the relevant rescue CD... but as you say, hard drives can also fail.

 

Which media to store important data long term on is a problem.. I have found DVDs which become corrupted in time, and wonder now about the longetivity of flash media as a long term storage solution ?

We can look at photos and read books that are 100 years old if they have been stored properly... will future generations have access to digital media 100 years from now ?

 

Alan.

 

We haven't been deploying the SSD's in large numbers until last year when they became standard for office laptop users, none of those have failed yet.  We've a few manufacturing PC's that had 32GB enterprise SSD's that were deployed a few years ago and running 24/7, there's been several SSD failures with those well within the expected endurance but they were all the same model and I suspect something was up with them.

 

The reason I separate physical damage and just simple failure is that I suspect many of the laptop drive failures are due to impact damage as I see people carrying laptops around still powered up, thumping them down on desks etc. so in some cases the drives have only lasted a month or so.  They're a huge mix of different brands so it's not like it's a particular fault with a certain model, comparatively the desktop PC's have a very low hard drive failure rate which I attribute to the fact they're just sitting still - some of the hard drives have been running 24/7 for years between reboots for over a decade now without failure.  I'm expecting the SSD's to be more reliable in laptops as they aren't as vulnerable to physical damage, it will be interesting to see once we have a few hundred out there after a couple of years how many failures there have been.

 

I absolutely wouldn't worry about SSD reliability, I've been using SSD's personally for must be well over a decade (first one was a 1.8in 32GB model with an £800 RRP) and almost all my PC's have been using SSD's as their boot drives for several years now - there's only one left and the only reason it doesn't have an SSD is because I haven't decided what I'm doing with it long term.  I think they're a great investment particularly for laptops now that you can get reasonable capacity for the money, not only are they fast but they run cooler and are more power efficient than hard drives as well.  I treat all storage drives as if they could fail imminently without recovery obviously seeing it happen frequently at work is a good incentive to keep important data backed up.

 

The problem you mention regarding long term data storage is one that's been discussed quite seriously with a few news articles on it last month, there is a genuine concern that in centuries to come there's going to be a digital black hole and much of the information is going to be lost.  There's not really any technology I'd trust for long term archiving, we use magnetic tape at work but it has various issues in that the standards and interfaces are changing so backups from even just a decade ago are a right pain to restore and it's not a technology particularly well suited to home use.  For the last 15 years or so I've just continuously rolled the data forward, I used to back up to CD's, then DVD's and now hard drives first IDE and now sata.  For me the key thing is to simply to keep separate backups so I backup to a NAS, an attached USB drive and another separate USB drive which I keep with me so if the house is robbed or burnt down and I'm not there I still have one copy.  Once I have faster broadband I'll start backing up online, right now it's just not viable for the amount of data.

 

John

[AlanRHB]

Thanks for that reassurance Martin... good to have the heads up from a professional. I have lost track of the number of friends I have partitioned hard drives for in order to persuade them to save data to a partition other than the OS one, then save an image of the OS partition to a logical one with recovery CD and instructions for them to restore that image. ... but my knowlege of SSD's is not great as I don't keep up with technology so much these days.

I remember when I bought my first modern desktop new... Pentium 3 800Mhz... upgrade to  512mb of memory, and a massive 20Gb hard drive on Win 98se... the shop owner could not understand why I wanted such a huge hard drive claiming that I would never fill it... but I was into editing video then, and used to archive a forum called "Simply DV" for the owner, a pro TV cameraman, during the early days of digital video recording and editing.

.

Doesn't help if the drive fails of course, so as you suggest, always keep a copy of valuable data, including OS partition image, OFF the machine.

 

Cheers... Alan.

[AlanRHB]

Thank you for your answer too John, I was both typing an answer and had a pizza in the oven ... didn't see your answer till I had posted...  some very interesting observations, and again reassurance about SSD's from a professional...  backup to the "Cloud"... I am wary because of 1: security ... 2: their servers may fail, though servers are also backed up by reputable companies I suppose... and thirdly, what if a company selling server space went bust ?  am I being paranoid...

 

Alan.

[kilted]

Well did a check this morning and found that out of 350GB (approx) on the C drive, I have 250GB in pictures/videos/music/documents so a 250GB SSD would be more than enough.

 

Think I might wait for Win 10, do an install of the OS and the programmes I have (such as games, CS4, MS office etc) onto the SSD and keep the current HDD for data.

 

I might go the whole hog and selectively copy the data files I want to keep onto one of my backup drives and then reformat/partition the data drive (currently has a partition for system).

 

Will be many hours of transferring data/reloading but might be worth it (as there are a few things I probably wouldn't bother to load onto the SSD)

 

Current:

1TB HDD (space used -350GB), 2 backups (F Drive 1TB directly connected to USB) and WD NAS drive (2TB) connected via WIFI

 

Planned:

240 or 250GB SSD for OS and programmes, 1TB data drive (data recovered to the drive after formatting).

 

Might try to crack the current F drive out of its caddy (WD Elements) as it is USB 2.0 and things would be a lot quicker with USB3.0 or SATA.

[Aspman]

That's pretty much my plan. Get a 256GBP SSD for Windows 10 when it is released and use the old HD for storage. I duplicate pictures to an external drive anyway.

[JohnMcL7]

Thank you for your answer too John, I was both typing an answer and had a pizza in the oven ... didn't see your answer till I had posted...  some very interesting observations, and again reassurance about SSD's from a professional...  backup to the "Cloud"... I am wary because of 1: security ... 2: their servers may fail, though servers are also backed up by reputable companies I suppose... and thirdly, what if a company selling server space went bust ?  am I being paranoid...

 

Alan.

 

 

There's no harm in being a bit paranoid when it comes to data as it's a frustratingly frequent occurrence when people tell me how crucial the data is on the hard drive I've just told them I can't get any data from and their only option is a pricey data recovery company yet despite the data being so crucial they haven't made a single backup.  It's even more frustrating on the occasions when the people have had a hard drive fail, I've managed to get the data back (on one occasion it took over a week solid running 24/7 as the drive was failing), replaced the drive, set up automatic sync software for them, showed them what USB drive to buy as a backup then next year when the drive has failed again...still no backups!

 

With regards to cloud storage services, the data stored with them should be in addition to your local backups so if the cloud system does screw up or go bust, you've not lost anything. The advantage is that the cloud sync systems are usually pretty good and in some cases offer advanced features like differential backups (allowing you to restore older versions of files if something goes wrong) and they're entirely separate from your physical data so if your house gets broken into, catches fire etc. the data on the remote systems is safe.  There's no easy answer to the security question and it really comes down to how much you trust the storage company, unfortunately there's been some who have claimed no-one had the key to your data apart from yourself (By generating the encryption key from a password) then afterwards that claim has turned out to be false.

 

John

[io1901]

I actually did this at the weekend took out a 230 GB HD and replaced with a 120GB Samsung SSD on my desktop  I was tempted to start afresh but I just couldn't be bothered so cloned the drive across (using an external caddy). Took the old drive out, stuck the new one in , booted PC - changed the boot drive and exactly the same as before only quicker and then backed up the entire lot to a 3tb external drive.  Took about 20mins of my time and about 1hour to clone and about 1.5hrs to backup.   

[Fellwalker]

I swapped my C drive on my 4 year old Windows 7 Dell laptop for a (same size) 500GB SSD.  It makes booting significantly faster, and it certainly feels faster.

Cloning was easy with the software provided, I just had to buy a caddy.  My 500GB D drive remains as was for data storage.

UEFI will make a big difference when I next change - I'm waiting to see what happens with Windows 10, but on the bais of how well it runs even in a Virtual machine on my laptop, i will be upgrading.

Everything is backed up to another PC, and some of it to cloud and/or external HDD; and photos even to DVD as well.

[Phil-E]

Just built my dad a new PC and we went for an SSD in the end as he has an external drive for storing/backing up and speed is more important than 1TB of space.

Used an OCZ arc drive. 240gb for £70.

Less noise in the system and from pressing the power button to opening internet explorer and Google loading takes a total of 20 seconds. To say he was pleased was an under statement as his old (10 year + old PC) used to take several minutes to just boot to desktop.

Phil

[gazpot0111645]

Go SSD, I use SSD for my gaming pc. Make sure you do a fresh install as you dont want to be cloning the drive as you wont benfit from its full potential as SSD's operate slightly differently when it comes to the data storage. Make sure when buying an SSD that you look at the read/write speeds as some can be very slow for SSD. You will be impressed. I have just recently installed a samsung 850 Evo 500gb. Prices have come down alot for SSD's in the recent months.

[GentleGiant]

Samsung has some big issues on their 850 Evo range - massive read/write speed drops; they are still working on fixes, so keep an eye on your speeds.