5 Aug
2021
5 Aug
'21
7:30 p.m.
On Thursday 05 August 2021 09:36:10 dep wrote:
Hi, everybody!
I'm giving some thought to putting an SSD in my desktop machine. The
relatively small ones, ~500gb, have gotten pretty cheap, and they seem to
be fairly reliable (though I can't say I utterly trust them, though
traditional HDs aren't perfect in this regard, either). It seems that if
properly employed, one could speed up my system considerably.
But I thought I'd ask here before pushing the buy button.
So . . . has anyone here used an SSD in a desktop machine? If so, what did
you put on it?
I have 20tb of storage on the machine, most of it big photo files, and I
expect to keep all of it. Absent a compelling reason to the contrary, I'd
keep ~/ on a conventional hard drive as well. My initial idea is putting
the / partition and swap partitions on the thing, with everything home and
below staying put.
An additional consideration is my idea of keeping a fully current install
where it is now, though not using it unless the SSD blows up. Is this
reasonably easy to do, or would it be a giant pita?
Anyone here have any experience doing this kind of thing?
--
dep
Everybody else has said their piece, and mostly it is what I have read about
SSDs, or is much like my own experience. However, I would add one or two
things more.
I got a WD 1 tb SSD about a year ago now, and it works fine. I use it for my
main drive (home directory, root and swap), then have several internal hard
drives, three external hard drives (so far), and innumerable flash drives for
this and that. I don't really keep anything permanent on it, however, and
immediately transfer anything important to those other hard drives, and to
backups. I wanted a bigger hard drive, because sometimes I download loads of
stuff and was running out of space with my old 500 gb hard drive.
Example (rather off-topic):
https://www.jazzstreams.org/JwBP/JwBP-index.php
("Jazz with Bob Parlocha" for you jazz hounds out there - about 100 gb)
I find and download lots of stuff like this: free, legal and BIG, so a 500 gb
hard drive wasn't enough; 1 tb only barely does the job sometimes.
Boot times are a little faster, yes, but this is a desktop and I don't really
reboot a lot. It seems to run a little faster in general than my old hard
drive.
One big selling point for me, which I don't think you will read anywhere else,
is that you can do a hardware hack that I witnessed with my own eyes. My
uber-geeky friend took the DVD drive out of his Lenovo laptop, and simply
inserted an SSD drive, and voila! he had a second hard drive in his laptop.
(You will obviously want to shut down the machine first before trying this.)
Since I am shopping round for a laptop to use when I am travelling, and soon
to be moving house, probably all the way across the continent, this would
make it convenient to transfer everything just by taking it out of my desktop
computer, then (soon, I hope) transferring it into my reasonably new (but
perhaps slightly used) laptop.
Last thing: Somewhere I read online (while researching SSDs before buying
them) that they have one peculiar down side; which is that they must be used
regularly. According to the source, which I don't recall, if an SSD lies
dormant for too long, they become more susceptible to data loss. In other
words, they work fine as long as they keep running, until of course one day
they will stop, anyway; but you must keep them in use. Don't use an SSD as a
drive that you keep in a drawer somewhere, full of stuff that you don't
access often, yet don't want to lose.
Sorry for the length. If I had more time, I could have made it shorter, but
this is just writing off the top of my head. I hope those few extra points
were worth the read.
Bill