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.

Have you got any links to this? Was going to shortly place an order for one.

Adding an SSD has a nice benefit. It will make your resources, like RAM go much further. 

 

So on a old HD opening say email took ages, so you leave it open. Same for most everything till it all slows down a bit.

 

Incomes SSD, you open, and close with so much more speed, checking an email is easy to open mail program, synch, and then close it again. Boom, RAM isn't tied up all day telling you about the latest deal.

 

So SSD should change the way you work your machine. If however you just open everything and leave it open, you won't notice a huge difference. But you will if you use your machine. 

 

If you want to go silly, and have the spare RAM, then create a RAM disk that clones your HD>folderA That way you're working in RAM, that is written/synched to HD asynchronously. It's ridiculously fast and surprisingly hardy, especially on laptops as they have there own UPS. Only down side is time to write and system crash, changes in that gap will be lost... but if you want speed, that's where it gets no better.

 

I have a selection of Intel latest model jump whatever it is...,  samsung 850 and some others from when they first arrived. I tend to rotate them, so I put in new drive in, and build the system, use it for 6 months then pop disk out and another in. Once I'm up to 3, I rotate. I loose a bit of time, but it keeps everything tip top. I run linux mostly too, but I think it's habit I got from win98/2k days, just easier, for me, to rebuild than maintain decay.

Have you got any links to this? Was going to shortly place an order for one.

 

My bad, it is the 840 with the slow down issue, the 850 has had some dodgy firmware issues, but that was several months ago, so should be OK by now. Sorry

Just bought a Sandisk SSD - link

 

Was on a special deal for £49.99 which is the cheapest I have ever seen a 240GB SSD.

 

Current Disk list = (1) SSD , (2) current HDD , (3) external WD backup disk and (4) WD Mycloud NAS

 

So the plan now is potentially to do a clean install of Win 10 on the SSD using an ISO, load up the programmes on to it (Adobe PS CS4, Office, etc - should only half fill the SSD at most) then restore my documents, music, photos etc from either the NAS( probably the slower option) or my external backup drive (see below) onto the current HDD (which I will format to ensure the cleanest install).

 

The external HDD (3) that I was using for back up is a WD caviar green ( I did crack open the chassis) so it wont be great for speed as it appears that they fix the speed for power saving at some point between 5400-7500RPM. Might crack it out of the chassis, use it as an internal drive to back up the documents (got to be quicker than USB2 or transferring over wifi) while transferring my stuff, then transfer the contents back onto the quicker internal HDD (2).

 

That way I can individually select what is going onto the "new" system but has one main drawback - it might be a bit of a ball ache downloading updates for the various programmes (most of the software will probably need a few years worth of updates to bring them up to date) although I might not install a few things.

 

Other option is transfer the documents etc off the HDD(2) onto the spare HDD(3), clone the system and programmes, transfer the documents back to the main HDD and then do an upgrade to Win 10 after I have checked the new configuration is stable.  Potentially saves me hours of updating but might mean the OS operates a fraction slower as its not a clean install.

I have an SSD as my OS drive and Sata as my data drive. Big speed increase. I swapped out my laptop HD with a 500gb SSD and that is super quick as well.

For those wanting to use win10 as an excuse for a full wipe... Tread with care!

 

Bear in mind that win10 is only a free *upgrade* to an existing windows install.. you do not get a product key for windows 10.

Allegedly once you have upgraded and activated an existing machine you are able to reinstall fresh to that machine as long as your primary login is a microsoft account.

 

However - many (myself included) have not managed to get Win10 to re-activate after a fresh install, even with minor hw changes (i removed a hdd in my case) so YMMV.

For those wanting to use win10 as an excuse for a full wipe... Tread with care!

 

Bear in mind that win10 is only a free *upgrade* to an existing windows install.. you do not get a product key for windows 10.

Allegedly once you have upgraded and activated an existing machine you are able to reinstall fresh to that machine as long as your primary login is a microsoft account.

 

However - many (myself included) have not managed to get Win10 to re-activate after a fresh install, even with minor hw changes (i removed a hdd in my case) so YMMV.

 

Erm, you do get a key if you know where to look.

 

Do the normal upgrade and end up with a fully activated windows 10 install, you can then use one of the many free programs to extract the windows 10 key. I used Belarc from here: http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

 

Format the machine and do a clean install using the key you extracted previously when prompted, it should accept this and activate quite happily, simples

 

I used local accounts all the way through this procedure to make sure it's not linked to my microsoft account.

Hmmm.. I did try that, however the key i extracted for the upgrade turned out to be an "generic" key - which didnt work.

Did a bit more digging, turns out I was wrong and the key I have is also a generic one as I'm not in the habit of googling my windows keys

 

Still, I was able to clean install and use it without a microsoft account so your issue might have been caused by the hardware change.

SSD added and tbh I can't believe the hype for these things...

 

It is far better than I thought it would be! Load time (from switch on to fully useable) down to sub 20secs from about 90-120 secs, shut down taking about 5-6 secs, loading PS CS4 which used to take a minute or so is down to about 10 secs.

 

Now just to decide about when to upgrade to Win 10