75ZT Community

Last year I saw some good deals on SSDs, but the capacity didn't match what I have on the laptop without a considerable price hike.

Now I happened to opoen it up today to clean out the dust (it kept going treacle mode) and noticed it had a second HDD slot. So I can sensibly fit a small SSD and a normal HDD for bulk storage. However I can't remember where the decent priced SSDs were to be found. DABS and Ebuyer seem pricy now.

Suggestions on a postcard (well a forum really) please?

Sometimes Amazon have some good prices Duncan.

I've always found Ebuyer to be rather pricey, so Amazon is always the first place I look, failing that you could always check out the bay. SSDs are brilliant but a word of warning, if they fail then you've lost all your data whereas if a normal HDD fails most of the time you can retrieve the data off it so I wouldn't store anything massively important on it without a backup.

Might I suggest a smaller SSD ( Cheaper) and an External USB HDD
( well maybe not as weeny as ours )

I've put a just a small 60gb SSD in our old Dual core laptop, as its not used for storing stuff. (edit..got the size wrong Doh!)
Its certainly a lot quicker to boot, so quiet and the battery lasts longer too.

I personally don't see the point in buying a Vast SSD to match your HDD size and storing stacks of stuff , in these days of Larger Flash drives, DVD,Ext-drives , NAS's etc ..

They all have the risk of losing data . and hot laptops are probably the most risky ?.

All Our photo's ( our most treasured Data) are on a NAS with Mirroring Raid, and also on DVD's stored away in the dark, about the best I can do ..

BTW Our SSD was bought from Fleabay.
probably best to just shop about , even the Crucial Website has prices very similar to those of Amazon /Ebuyer/Dabs etc .

Chris

SSDs aren't that risky compared to HDDs. In both cases you'll need backups unless your data is worthless.

A huge SSD to replace all the space of an HDD doesn't make sense (for now), as long as money isn't abundant. A reasonable sized SSD to hold the OS and all the important software will do the job quite well. But it shouldn't be filled up completely, that will decrease the performance.

True, SSDs are far less likely to be damaged for example simply dropping your laptop while it's on will knacker a traditional HDD whereas an SSD would survive no problem. As long as a damaged hard drive is still spinning it's easy to get any recoverable data off it simply plug it into another system and you should be able to access it, if it is dead to the point of not spinning at all then you can send it to the manufacturer who will dismantle it and get it working then send you the data back. If an SSD fails [rare but it does happen] you stand very little chance of getting any data back.

Thanks for all the feedback, great. I don't trust any kind of disc, as I've seen two peole lose lots of important data when the disc went down, and both were conventional HDDs. Even forensic recovery didn't work on those two.

Yes, I was going to go for a smaller SSD now, but rather than an external HDD I can fit a standard HDD as drive 2, and set it to spin up only when I need data on it. Either 128 or 256 gig, not quite sure yet.

I'll try amazon too, but I'm always a bit wary of the bay for memory products, theres a large amount of fake stuff around with false capacity info. Not heard this directly for SSDs it was more SD cards.

Anyhow, certainly given me food for thought guys, thanks.

Duncan wrote:I don't trust any kind of disc, as I've seen two peole lose lots of important data when the disc went down, and both were conventional HDDs. Even forensic recovery didn't work on those two.

A mechanical impact may cause the write/read heads of the HDD to crash onto the fast spinning surface of the magnetic disk (at least 5400 RPM). This results in material scraped off and the final loss of the data stored at that part. Then these particles will get in between the head and the disk again, causing more surface area to be destroyed beyond recovery. It's like an avalanche. Then even the very best specialist won't be able to recover the data. So in such a case the best thing to do, if one really needs to recover the data, is switching off the computer immediately and to call in the specialists.

Duncan wrote:Either 128 or 256 gig, not quite sure yet.

A 128 GB SSD should be sufficient, as long as you will use less than 100 GB.

Keep in mind that the formatted capacity of any disk isn't what it's labeled for. The manufactures are using the decimal system, 128 GB equaling 128,000,000,000 bytes instead of the 137,438,953,472 bytes a computer calculates them.

And secondly, a SSD works at its best when not used to the full extend. As a rule of thumb I'd suggest to leave about 5 to 10% unpartitioned.

I'm pretty cavalier with my SSD boot drive Duncan, allowing all apps to install as well as the system files etc, and it still only amounts to 65GB.

When it comes to SSD's Ebuyer are one of the cheapest and they do next day delivery.When buying PC/Laptop components, I always go through them as they tend to be much cheaper in my experience. OCZ products I've used through work, and once funds allow I will be getting one for my laptop. The 256GB looks very tempting.

Again thanks for the suggestions and info. With the hard disc failures, one was so bad because the disc was encrypted, so you only need to lose a small important sector and you can't recover it. The second was even more guaranteed to be unrecoverable. The gentleman in question had just installed a GPS receiver with an external antenna, and wanted to carry the laptop to the window to see if it would pick up signal. So he moved the antenna onto the laptop palmrest. Now some may already have twigged what happened next. The majority of external GPS antennas, have a magnetic base to stick to your car roof. That probably wouldn't have mattered if he hadn't placed it directly above the spinning platters of his HDD. Instant, bulk erasing of data. By the time he got to the window, the machine was making funny noises and the OS had frozen!

Would be unfair to blame the hard drive for that particular failure, not sure how an SSD would behave if placed next to a big magnet. Ultimately anything electrical can fail but SSDs are far less likely to, let's not forget that a bog standard usb memory stick is an SSD and they generally get abused. As for size, seen as you've got the capability for 2 drives, I would go for a small one, you could easily get away with a 64GB if you were to just install OS and important programs on there. Best place to look for them would be Google Shopping that way you can easily see who is cheapest.

I wasn't blaming the HDD honestly. I was blaming the numpty with the magnet.

An SSD oughtn't to be affected by a magnet as it's basically capacitive.

Thanks all. Bought one through ebuyer. Samsung. The samsung software refused to see it in a USB caddy, but in a sata caddy all was well.

I struggled a bit with cloning, as it kept failing partway through. Turns out I had errors on my HDD and chkdsk fixed them for me. Just a shame the cloning software I used gave meaningless failure messsages instead of telling me to run chkdsk.

Anyhow, all done, and lighning fast. Battery seems to be lasting even longer, as well.

Alas error messages can be misleading.
But finally you've got a good result.

I have a samsung 810 series iirc in my laptop and very pleased with it. Dont think you'll have any issues with your choice.