SSD. Talk to me.

I’ve been thinking of upgrading to a solid state drive for a couple of years and now am thinking of going ahead in the new year.

The ballache of either having to do a fresh install or cloning the drive and having a load of shit still on my new drive has put me off. I’m ambivalent and terrible at maintaining my PC.

How how you found swapping from a rusty spinning drive and was it much hassle for you to change over?

It’s got to the point where sooner or later my harddrive is going to die and I will regret not doing it, so need to get on with it really.

(I am reasonably competent at putting together PC’s and can do most things, but am lazy and have a love hate relationship with technology)

I think most SSD suppliers have utilities to help with the transfer. My son did it on his early this year and it was fairly painless.

It’s very easy these days, little things can make life easier – like a USB3 caddy (£10) and of course a USB3 enabled port on the PC, but even those can be retro fitted to a lot of PCs for about £10 – I should add it doesn’t make it easer, just a lot quicker.

It’s simply a case of connection SSD to caddy and plug into PC.

Use one of the free tools, or ideally the one that comes with the SSD, I like the Kingston ones, but they all do the same thing really.

Install the SSD and boot it up, 90% of the time that’s it. Sometimes you have to repeat it for unknown reasons, but it usually works first time.

I should say I’m not an IT Techie, but I work for an IT support provider so if I screw it up, I can beg one of them to fix it for me, gives me confidence way beyond my ability.

You can do it the other way, back up all your data, do a fresh install, download all your software again, reinstall data etc, but it’s easier just to mirror it.

Have done 5 in Macs. Pretty straightforward. Mix of physcial spannering (mac needs small phillips plus some torx drivers) and software re-install. You are quite right the current drive will die sometime (get some data at least onto free cloud eg google drive asap or have a backup). I like Samsung Evo’s (approx £110 for a 500gb). You can buy a cheap usb caddy (£10-15?) and put the old drive in it which is a good way of transferring old files onto the new disk. Others can help with windows install as that’s not my thing.

You should post up machine spec, its probably SATA data bus which will make new SSD pretty simple

Good luck. They transform the machine.

I belive crucial SSDs come with an Acronis key, so you can create a backup image, and dump it onto your new SSD, Job jobbed.

If you are getting a SSD make sure it is self encrypting. Apart from the obvious advantage of “no-one can steal your pc and read your data” you can also wipe the entire drive in a second when you come to dispose of it.

Apart from being pretty easy, the difference between SSD and spinny drives is night & day. You will very soon forget the small amount of pain in swapping.

I’ve done t a few times now. You just need a USB caddy and I buy Samsung evo ssds as they come with the software. Make sure the ssd is as large as the existing disk or it can be a bit more painful

Fresh install for that brand new PC feeling

If it’s a desktop rather than a laptop, you probably don’t even need a caddy. Just whack it in as a second drive.

Samsung Evo is what you want.

Just done mine. The only hassle with swapping is resizing the partition. Typically ssd drives are smaller capacity but the price has come down loads so if you can get one the same size or bigger it’s a breeze. You can keep your old drive in the caddy you buy so you have a back up of sorts once done. Its a good time to have a tidy up and probably makes sense to do a clean install but cloning is so easy you can just do that and put off the housekeeping for a couple more years

Yeh,

Personally, I’d do a clean install, but you can use an image of your old one if you really want.

Pc is a desktop with a 5-6 year old Asus motherboard in it and I have a 1TB HDD that is almost full. Guessing I’d need some kind Sata to SSD connector thingy?

My plan was to buy another 1TB HDD as well as a 500GB SSD, and copy all my films and games onto the new drive and then clone under 500 GB to the SSD.

I can’t face installing everything again with a 1mbps connection.

I’d love a fresh install, but I don’t think I can deal with the hassle.

Samsung seem to get good reviews on amazon, but are a bit more expensive than sandisk or crucial. Will I notice the difference?

Sounds like a reasonable plan. My SSD just plugged into the same sata connector. Can’t comment on brands. I bought a crucial as it was way cheaper (£100 for 750Gb) and it works really well. All much improved.

Sata is the type connector/data bus – SSD will be Sata. OP you might want to take a photo of the inside of the box around the drives so we can see. At that age its Sata 2 I think (rather than 3) so max speed 250Mps (again I think, have to be careful with Cougar about 😉 )

Of you are going to buy a 1tb HDD then you night get away with a 250 SSD (£60 vs £110 -ish). You might want to have a review of what you have an whether you really need it all, as you know you don’t need fast access to it all.

As the posters above have said a fresh install of windows will be a good idea but will be a bit more work than a clone

Samsung seem to get good reviews on amazon, but are a bit more expensive than sandisk or crucial. Will I notice the difference?

In speed terms no, if it lasts longer yes 😉