bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

After my first swap of a harddrive to SSD I'll never use a harddrive for the boot drive again! I got about a 2-3x improvement in disk speed and boot time went from 45 sec. to under 15 sec. Definitely worth the $$$'s and effort!!

I'm using SSD 850 EVO 2.5" SATA III 1TB SSD's. I also use the same SSD's in external housings for laptop backup while on the road. They are close to indestructible!

bwa

Tonym2s Loc: Florida

Every thing gets faster! It's pricer than most but check out Sansung 850 pro 512 GB. I got one one amazon for $214.00. Though you can't defrage them (you can but you should'nt wears them out faster) they almost all come with software for upgrading firmware and maintanance with a program called TRIM and Collection/Garbage Collection that to SSD is what defrage is to HDD but does no harm.

FYI The bigger the SSD the faster it is. First SSD was 250 GB upgraded to 500GB WOW! The speed differance even between two SSDs was alot.

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

Crucial has everything you need check their website

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Not really. For a given manufacturer and model, there is no difference in access speed between sizes. If you’re seeing a difference, it could be a different model or manufacturer, later Drive, different interface speed, and a number of other variables.

Regarding trimming, there’s really no reason to do this manually if you’re running Windows 7 or 10, as the OS issues the appropriate command with each delete. If you’re using an aftermarket drive on a Mac, a previous version of Windows or Linux, then you may need to. Please note the following excerpt from Samsung’s technical paper on the subject:

“ The TRIM command is sent to the SSD controller automatically by the OS every time it deletes a file. As it requires OS support, not all users will be able to use native TRIM functionality. On PCs, TRIM is supported in Windows 7 or later. On Macs, TRIM is only supported for Apple’s OEM SSDs and is not supported for Samsung’s (or any other manufacturers’) aftermarket SSDs. Users of older Windows operating Systems (Windows XP, Windows Vista) may use Magician’s built-in “Performance Optimization” feature to manually pass the TRIM command to the SSD on demand (or via user-specified schedule).“

If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of SSD operation, the following white paper from Samsung is worth a read: http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/downloads/document/Samsung_SSD_White_Paper.pdf

JeffR Loc: Rehoboth Beach, Delaware

I agree. I also bought a 500GB Samsung SSD and the included software worked flawlessly. Rather than buying the adapter cable, however, I got a "Sabrent Ultra Slim USB 3.0 to 2.5-Inch SATA External Aluminum Hard Drive Enclosure [Black] (EC-UK30)" for around $9 from Amazon. The enclosure holds the SSD during the cloning, then afterwards holds the old HDD you've removed from your computer, giving you a "new" USB external drive. The speedup was significant and well worth the effort and investment. Here's a link for the drive enclosure: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LS31KQG/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

markngolf Loc: Bridgewater, NJ

That is a choice. My backups are incremental. I've used Acronis for 10+ years. It's not a waste of time - just another choice. The entire process took about 1 hour.
Mark

rfmaude41 Loc: Lancaster, Texas (DFW area)

$55????? There are many, many that are $10 or less. Just go to your nearest computer / electronics store.

For a Single SSD: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-ssd-mount-black/5516000.p?skuId=5516000

For double SSD's: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/icy-dock-ez-fit-pro-internal-3-5-drive-bay-black/5705564.p?skuId=5705564

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

Don't have to reinstall any applications if you just clone the drive. But be aware that the current drive has to have enough stuff removed to be able to shrink the partition down to a size that will fit on the SSD. I do have Acronis for cloning. But I also bought this and it works well. And it is so easy:

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-10Gbps-Standalone-Duplicator-SDOCK2U313R/dp/B019Y4JE22/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1511310540&sr=8-3&keywords=drive+cloner

One word of advice is to place two labels on this duplicator: "Source" and "Destination" You don't want to make a mistake in duplicating.

It is fairly easy to change partition sizes. But the partition, or partitions, on the source, has to fit on the destination drive. Once the old drive has been duplicated, the partition can be expanded to full size again.

Reinaldokool Loc: San Rafael, CA

Yes. Yes. Yes. Put your programs and OS on the SSD. Modern apps are constantly switching pieces of code in and out. It makes a big difference.

DHooch

I built a new computer with two SSDs and two 2- terabyte hard disk drives. I installed the Windows OS on one of the SSD's. It is drive C:. It appears that it performs fast, with no problems. However, I used the second SSD for rendering video files. My video editing software was very slow. I changed the render disk to one of the hard disks and everything started to work much quicker. Hence, don't use an SSD for anything that requires a lot of heavy, intensive data manipulation, such as rendering video files.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Then there’s a problem with the SSD itself, the interface, application configuration or something else, because there are no cases that I can imagine where a HD can even come close to the performance of an SSD in any respect, much less be faster. A non-defective SSD, with an appropriate interface and configured correctly has an access time in microseconds as opposed to milliseconds for a HD, and the transfer rate of even a slow SSD is at least 3-4x that of a fast HD, and those are the only specs that matter. The ONLY advantages to a HD are larger potential size and cost per TB.

DHooch

I'm a retired computer systems analyst. I only know what I have observed. I use that "render" SSD for other large files that are read and written with no noticeable issues. I first tried the OS SSD with the same slow results, before I went with the hard disk drive. It may be how my non-linear video editing software utilizes drives, but, as I said, that is what happened. I'm just giving my two cents to the discussion.

geezer7 Loc: Michigan

I built a PC a couple of years ago and decided to use an SSD as my C drive. I experienced a massive improvement in boot time. Without actual testing my impression is that program start-up time has been reduced. However I am not convinced that with adequate RAM, application performance has been significantly improved. For instance with photo postprocessing, image files probably reside on a mechanical hard drive so no speed improvement will occur with loading images. With adequate RAM most applications will probably be loaded into system memory and not require significant swapping. Just my impressions without significant testing. The startup improvement is great but if one doesn't reboot frequently it may not be that important.
If you often jump from one app to another you'll see some improvement but I don't think you'll experience much speed up while running a post processing app.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Then I guess it’s ghosts in the machine 🤗. As a computer professional who can understand the applicable specifications, how would you explain it? I wonder if you’ve tried the same HW with other NLE applications? Having worked for 3 storage companies that produced high bandwidth storage devices where NLE was a large segment of our market share, I can tell you that our customers (who were the major NLE players such as Avid, Adobe and Apple) always wanted the highest bandwidth devices they could afford. In earlier days, that was a FibreChannel-attached SAN optimized for high BW sequential transfers, built around the fastest 15K RPM hard drives we could buy. Today, you can achieve that performance by striping a number of HDs or by using a single SSD, but unless the ap has a bug that disadvantages SSDs, then, one-on-one, the SSD will always win. I don’t doubt your experience, but I don’t believe you can generalize that to all rendering workflows. Now the average render farm may need so much capacity that SSDs are too expensive at present (video storage is very demanding in terms of capacity), but as SSD prices drop and capacity increases, we’ll reach the point where it’s cheaper to use fewer SSDs rather than 4-8x the number of striped drives. I’m wondering what the application was and whether other users have experienced this phenomena?

Edit: It may be that the application may require some tuning or even modification to use the SSD’s BW. Over the years, I’ve encountered video (NLE, Surveilance, satellite imagery, etc ) applications a number of times where the measured performance was MUCH lower than expected. In most cases, it was the application, and at least several times required a long negotiation with the SW company to get the required mods made. In another case (Apple), their SW was specifically optimized for their storage and was substantially slower with ours even though ours was 2-3x the speed. Needless to say, we were not successful in convincing Apple to mod FCP to allow the customer to purchase our faster device.

Pegasus Loc: Texas Gulf Coast

And that's actually way overpriced for your opinion. You may want us to believe that you are a retired computer systems analyst, but I question your methodology, observations and conclusions. I am also agog by your incurious attitude. If what you "report" would have happened to me, I would be have been investigating the hell out of it. An SSD is superior to an HDD in every way except for cost per gigabyte and even that advantage has shrunk. If I installed one and discovered that it was that much slower than an HDD, I would be searching for answers not just throwing up my hands and saying: "oh well, an SSD doesn't render, I'll just rip it out and put back the HDD and call it a day."

I was going to say that it's a good thing you're retired, but decided not to.