[marlman]

I've had my computer a few years now and its been great, it's an Intel Core i3 with 8gb of ram and a 1tb drive so its no slouch.

But lately its been giving me problems booting up coming up with read disc errors not all the time but every now and then.

So decided to get a new hard drive and keep the 1tb drive for data.

Was going to go down the normal drive route but while in the shop decided to try an SSD.

I bought a Samsung 120gb for £99

Well I just installed it and reinstalled Windows 8 on it and its got the real wow factor now.

Everything is running so mush faster programs load virtually instant its pretty impressive!

So if anyone is thinking of getting one go for it you will not be disappointed.

[whoever,hey]

Great aren't they!

There are many on these boards that still dont believe though.

[Johnbee]

Thanks for that OP, I have wondered whether they are any good. I have only an OEM Windows 7, so not sure if I could upgrade this way but you have made me want to investigate.

[Orbitalzone]

They really do give the best performance boost for a small outlay.

[d'@ve]

Originally Posted by marlman

I've had my computer a few years now and its been great, it's an Intel Core i3 with 8gb of ram and a 1tb drive so its no slouch.

But lately its been giving me problems booting up coming up with read disc errors not all the time but every now and then.

So decided to get a new hard drive and keep the 1tb drive for data.

Was going to go down the normal drive route but while in the shop decided to try an SSD.

I bought a Samsung 120gb for £99

Well I just installed it and reinstalled Windows 8 on it and its got the real wow factor now.

Everything is running so mush faster programs load virtually instant its pretty impressive!

So if anyone is thinking of getting one go for it you will not be disappointed.

Can't see how I'd get rid of the 27 second BIOS boot, though, so I'd still have that baggage to wait for I guess. Faster program load times would be nice but my slowest (Paint Shop Pro X5) only takes 15 seconds at most, even Powerdirector 11 takes less than that, and that's while watching fooball in Firefox on ITV and browsing DS on my other screen.

Are the potential improvements going to be worth it when I could gain an extra 2TB+ of HDD storage for my £100? Consolidating my three hard drives into one 3TB drive would probably benefit me more for my money, so I remain one of the unconvinced.

[Helbore]

Originally Posted by d'@ve

Can't see how I'd get rid of the 27 second BIOS boot, though, so I'd still have that baggage to wait for I guess.

Why on Earth does your BIOS take so long? I don't think I've seen anything but a server take that long to get through the BIOS (and that's because it has so many peripherals to load up before the OS).

[d'@ve]

Originally Posted by Helbore

Why on Earth does your BIOS take so long? I don't think I've seen anything but a server take that long to get through the BIOS (and that's because it has so many peripherals to load up before the OS).

Yeah, peripherals. Three hard drives, multiple partitions (9 in all, for various purposes) add-on PCI/PCIe cards and the rest. I don't really mind it though, TBH.

Switch on once a day, open the curtains, go put the kettle on, lay out my mug, coffee etc, return and it's done. It would help a bit when I switch operating systems though.

[s2k]

My system uses UEFI so the boot time is next to non-existant. Originally I would have the Windows 7 logon box appear just as my monitor was adjusting to the signal. Since I added an old SATA mechanical disk (for backup purposes only) it has added on a few seconds but still not enough for the 7 logo to actually finish the animation at boot

[noise747]

Mine uses UEFi as well and is almost instant, in fact the longest wait is for my video card to display it's logo, hopefully the new video card will not do that.

SSD do make a difference, certainly on boot up and the plug ins for photoshop and Vegas zooms in, where with the old spinny drive it took ages,

so SSd do make a difference if you got software that is bulky.

[paulj48]

Originally Posted by marlman

But lately its been giving me problems booting up coming up with read disc errors not all the time but every now and then.

So decided to get a new hard drive and keep the 1tb drive for data.

I'd be very wary of using a disk for my data that you know comes up with read disk errors now and then.

[c4rv]

Originally Posted by whoever,hey

Great aren't they!

There are many on these boards that still dont believe though.

like most things IT related, there are things they are good at and others were they make little difference.

If you need TB's storage and aren't made of money then you can't beat a mechanical drive.

Also once my PC is booted and I've loaded my apps I can hear my hard drive power down so I am guessing at that point its no going to make any difference what type of drive I am using.

And do I care about boot times ? Probably not, like most people I am fine to switch it on and walk away for a minute or so. Then the time from entering userid/password to desktop appearing is maybe 10 seconds or so. Can I live with that for the sake of 50 quid extra that it would cost to put my system partition on SSD, at the moment again I can.

I am not putting SSD down, I have one in my server which is running mysql application for which SSD is ideal. But in terms of bangs for bucks its not one size fits all

[Sexbomb]

Originally Posted by paulj48

I'd be very wary of using a disk for my data that you know comes up with read disk errors now and then.

So would I, I'd buy a new one.

[marlman]

Originally Posted by Sexbomb

So would I, I'd buy a new one.

Got no problem with using drive I formatted before using it. Plus I'm obsessed with backup.

It's automatically backed up daily to my NAS and I also do a manual backup once a week to another external drive.