In 2013 we bought a Sony Vaio Fit 15E laptop from JB HiFi. It came with an offer to upgrade from the installed Windows 7 to Windows 8 for the cost of P & P. I installed Windows 8 and over time, it upgraded itself to Windows 10.
It progressively became slower and slower until it reached the point of almost being unusable. The hard drive was obviously clapped out.
In March, I replaced the drive with a Toshiba 860 EVO solid state drive (SSD) and reinstalled Windows 10 and all the other software.
Wow. What a difference. Instead of being slower than death warmed up, it now runs faster than a scalded cat on steroids.
From the time of pressing the power button to the time it is fully booted up and has the browsers, Outlook 2016 and other programs ready to go is around 7 seconds, and from clicking on the Shut Down symbol to it being fully turned off takes even less time.
I also installed a Toshiba 840 EVO SSD when I built our current desktop computer in 2014. I recently also had to reprogram it as it had failed to install the latest version of Windows 10 and it would spend all day downloading and trying to install it, thus using up all of our data allowance.
I also installed a Toshiba 860 EVO as the drive on which to image the other drive to, using Paragon Hard Disk Manager. Using the 2 SSD drives, it can image almost 150 GB of data in next to no time instead of previously taking hours.
The desktop takes around 14 seconds to fully boot up, despite having a quad core processor with a faster speed rating than the laptop’s dual core processor, but it also has 2 SATA hard drives connected.
So, if you have a very slow computer, or would just like to turbo charge one, then upgrading your old hard drive to an SSD should make a world of difference to it.
I wonder if you meant Samsung EVO drives rather than Toshiba. EVO is a Samsung branding of their SSDs
I had one put into my Toshiba laptop a few years ago and you are so right it is great. Loads quickly and I like the way that it records data, much more efficient than the old type. I’ll be getting SSD in any new computer.
SSDs are great and the move to PCI-e, M2. NVMe type drives offer even greater speed possibilities. SSDs because of their solid state nature suffer far less from drops, knocks and bashings. They are harder to totally/securely wipe when being disposed of.
As a rule ensure you leave about 25% of the space free to ensure longest life as this will help good use of wear levelling. Never defrag though most OSes now recognise SSDs and will only use Trim rather than defrag. Never use Chkdsk with bad sector checking, Chkdsk with the /f switch is good practice.
Always remember to backup as just like the spinning disk drives failures can and do occur and a SSD can be difficult/impossible to retrieve information from if it’s controller has failed.
Yes. I was referring to Samsung.
Apologies.
I have a block splitter which is guaranteed to erase any drive. I will be using it t shortly to erase the old laptop drive.
An interesting overview to SSD lifetime is here. However, as @grahroll alluded to they can fail quite abruptly, unlike a spinning HDD where there are usually clues from noises to warnings.
I only have less than 30% used space on the SSD’s in both computers.
I use the 2 X 2Tb SATA hard drives in the desktop to store music, photos, videos, old documents and copies of the previous contents of both computers C drives prior to reinstallation.
Doesn’t that depend on the block-size of the filesystem? 
Seriously though, until you have seen the combustibles disappear skyward as fumes/smoke and the rest of the drive can be poured from a crucible, it hasn’t been erased …
This is also a good idea but distinct and separate backups from your computer are also needed to help ensure good chances of recovery in case of failure. The backups should never be always connected and should be removed once the backups are complete.
A hammer works just as well.
The truly only sure way, all others may only closely approximate perfection and depending on the desire to retrieve the information that closeness may not be enough.
When we bought our first business computer in 1985, it was fitted with a 10 MB hard drive. When the drive failed, I was amazed that the smallest available size drive was then 20 MB.
In 2001, after we acquired some internet kiosks which were built with 2 GBhard drives, I discovered that the smallest available drive was then 20 GB.
I see that Seagate unveiled a 60 TB SSD in 2016. If the storage capacity of drives keeps increasing at these rates, there will probably be one large enough to store the entire contents of the Library of Congress in the not too distant future.
Your point is valid, that the performance/price ratio of storage has increased beyond wildest dreams, however various estimates of the volume of the LOC suggest that we are already there in being able to save it all on one drive.
In 2010 the LOC had more than 4.5 petabytes in tape libraries plus rotating online storage. They are accumulating data as fast as any so it might be double or more today. A ways to go.
A few years ago the UKMetoffice had a chart showing their rapidly increasing data sets and how they proposed to store them. The data plateaued. Why? No storage vendor could present a convincing future product map that could handle the volumes. The gold standard remains tape libraries because of cost per byte, and tape transfer rates can bring quite powerful servers to their knees so the performance limitation is loading and positioning not read/write speeds.
It looks like there are wildly different ideas (by about 2-3 OOM) of what is in the LOC.
I bought a dead cheap second hand Macbook (white, 2010 model) which came with 2GB RAM and a 256GB hard drive which was as slow as a wet week. The battery was nearly dead, too. So I replaced the RAM with 8GB (turns out I could have gone to 16) and the drive with a Crucial MX200 250gb. Wish I had gone higher but meh, they are cheaper now. So the machine I have has gone from a slow tortoise to a bit of a hare. It boots fast and it accesses fast. I will get an enclosure for the SSD, and move that out, and replace it with a 1TB SSD instead. Who needs new Macbooks that you cant upgrade. Mine is a demon.
SSDs are a fantastic invention of new technology making a significant difference to computer performance. That said, they do have their problems.
- SSDs are based upon transistors holding a charge. Over time, that charge does and will leak. The SSD - like all of today’s spinning hard drives - does have error correction running but it can only correct for so much. Don’t use an SSD as an ‘archive’ that sits alone and is never written to or read from.
- SSDs have an extremely finite ‘life’. Over time, those transistors lose their ability to hold a charge. This life is normally defined as ‘read/write cycles’ - every time you write a transistor, it becomes a tiny bit weaker.
SSD manufacturers put a bunch of tricks into their hardware to lengthen its life and try to keep the data reliable. I mentioned error correction; they also automagically seek to ‘wear level’ - not write to one transistor or area all the time, but spread the load.
I use an SSD as my boot drive, but normal spinning hard drives everywhere else. One of these days, once the price drops enough, I will replace some of the spinning drives - but the question is whether the performance is worth the dollars.
These are not the only way to improve performance, of course. The cheapest way to significantly faster computing is to wipe everything (other than data) and start again. I know people who do this every eighteen months or so, and used to be one of them until I got lazy. It is incredible how much garbage accumulates in a Windows PC’s registry - most programs leave a trace behind when removed, and even software dedicated to tracking these down is imperfect.
Finally, a few of the more expensive PCs are starting to come with Optane (or Crosspoint) memory. This is generally used as a cache for RAM, being slower than RAM but faster than your SSD. We may well see this technology moving into the mainstream and supplementing SSDs in the near future.
The ultimate goal for me is that SSD’s becomes as fast (in data transfer r/w times) as installed RAM - they are getting closer but still a long way to go!
pH
There are two technical aspects to that, SSD performance and the bus speed between the SSD and RAM. Aspect 3 is cost and hence price the end user is willing to pay. As notebooks take over from desktops (OK, I am an oldie) low power (battery life) comes to the fore. Faster equals more power hungry equals less battery life and for most portable device users battery life is more important than absolute performance.
A major difference between an SSD and RAM is data retention when power is removed, and barring major technology advances it will always be a slower part if data retention is required. Since memory technology also advances in parallel the SSD will probably never catch up, and if it did it would probably be replacing RAM, costs being manageable. Then it would probably be called RAM or a variation on RAM. Then no more SSDs
