Discussion 7200RPM -> SSD for Win 10 - Don't hesitate!

[Todd33]

I recently bought a MX-500 M.2 and cloned my WD 7200RPM boot drive and then switched boot drives in the bios. I am an SSD convert. It breathed new life into my relatively new Ryzen home built. I should have done ti from the beginning. The HD access and ticking was driving me nuts. Every time I switched users, loaded programs, etc. I watched the HD access go to 100% for minutes while my system acted like it was a 386. The SSD changed everything. Never again am I going to boot off a non-SSD. I'm sure 95% of everyone here is saying "duh", but as an old timer who was scared off by SSD prices and sizes, I was slow to come around. The prices are much better now (1TB for $130) and I relized my original 2TB drive only had like 400GB on it, so why bother with all the extra space if nothing was using it?

Such an easy upgrade and made such a night and day difference. Don't be like me, don't be stubborn and use platter drives for a boot drive.

 

[EXCellR8]

Yes, SSD is superior as a boot drive regardless of OS. Most users here have already made the switch but only until you see the difference for yourself can you actually appreciate the advantage.

I would also make sure to disable features like Windows Superfetch because you don't really need it with SSD.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I could add the same goes for RAID0 10.000RPM Raptors. Nothing beats an SSD for access times, or random 4K writes. Switched in '09 and haven't looked back.

The prices are much better now (1TB for $130) and I relized my original 2TB drive only had like 400GB on it, so why bother with all the extra space if nothing was using it?

Precisely. Storage has also moved to external drives, or NAS, to a large extent. Not least because of laptops, where you can't just add another drive.

I'm quite confident seeing clients with 128GB SSDs. Most don't really need more, and if they do it's easily solved with a 512GB one. With the prices we're seeing, I wouldn't go lower then a 512GB drive anyway, because large drives perform better then small ones. (more physical NAND on the drive, the more parallel access you can achieve. Which equals better performance)

I would also make sure to disable features like Windows Superfetch because you don't really need it with SSD.

Windows should detect it's running on an SSD, and disable automatically. Doesn't hurt to check.

 

[LTC8K6]

"100% for minutes" sounds way off, though.

 

[VirtualLarry]

"100% for minutes" sounds way off, though.

If that's off, then it's not off by much, in Windows 10. It does a lot disk thrashing, for no good reason, sometimes, and it seems like it was designed for an SSD, and behaves particularly badly on a HDD. At least on a few of my rigs that I intentionally built with HDDs.

Now that 120/128GB-class SSDs have dropped below $20 in price, there's no reason not to use one as a boot drive for the OS disk. Well, unless you have good reason not too, I suppose.

I'm a little curious, though, about OEM rigs that ship with 1TB HDDs, and then adding a 120GB SSD. Is it better to install the SSD as the OS drive, or to set up some sort of tiered-storage / HDD caching?

 

[LTC8K6]

I've just never had a properly working hard drive that took "minutes" to switch users or load a program.
If I did, I would assume something was wrong with the computer.

I went to Samsung SSDs for the OS long ago.

Only use rust drives for the rest of the junk.

 

[EXCellR8]

I've found almost every version of Windows to heavily access the HDD for basically no reason; making sure to note if there were background updates, AV scans or other file operations in progress. I think that may have been one of the main reasons I was eager to upgrade to solid drives all those years ago. That scratching and scratching... and I was always pretty mindful of keeping my HD optimized.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've just never had a properly working hard drive that took "minutes" to switch users or load a program.
If I did, I would assume something was wrong with the computer.

In the PC game "Rust", on an i5-6400 OCed to ~3.8Ghz, 16GB DDR4, and an SSD for OS and a 7200RPM HDD for Steam game storage, my friend brought it to me for some computer work, and he showed me, while that game was in a loading phase off of the HDD, it would "grey out" (Winodws Application Not Responding), if you clicked on anything while it was loading the level assets.

There was nothing wrong (to my knowledge) with the HDD.

 

[LTC8K6]

In the PC game "Rust", on an i5-6400 OCed to ~3.8Ghz, 16GB DDR4, and an SSD for OS and a 7200RPM HDD for Steam game storage, my friend brought it to me for some computer work, and he showed me, while that game was in a loading phase off of the HDD, it would "grey out" (Winodws Application Not Responding), if you clicked on anything while it was loading the level assets.

There was nothing wrong (to my knowledge) with the HDD.

"minutes" is a hell of a long time to wait for a computer to respond.

Are you sure Windows was unresponsive for at least 120 seconds, and not 5 or 10 seconds?

Windows typically asks you if you want to wait, or close the program.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

"minutes" is a hell of a long time to wait for a computer to respond.

In the bad old days, that was nothing. 20 odd years ago, we had a computer (think it was some kind of P3) that took half an hour to just boot to a half usable state. You could literally make coffee and drink it while you waited for the thing to boot.

What usually happens is a double whammy of trying to load a program while swapping memory like mad because of too little RAM. That just kills any HDD, even modern ones.

I agree it sounds a bit strange on a modern system.