Just wanted to share this, probably old news to most of you out there, but: SSD actually does work!
I just installed an SSD (Solid State Drive) in my four year old (!) laptop and it is now lightning fast!
My laptop is an Acer Aspire 5741G with 4GB memory running Windows 7 64-bit. I switched the original 320GB HDD for a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD.
Simple setup
Included with the SSD drive is a piece of software called Samsung Data Migration. You also need a SATA to USB cable, you can select to buy the SSD with this cable included if you don’t already own one.
The Data Migration tool was a breeze, I just ran it and my existing hard drive including Windows and everything else on it was copied to the new SSD drive. I then turned off my laptop and switched drives and everything – totally unexpected – just worked!
The only thing I had to do was delete and move some files since I was going from an almost full 320GB drive to 250GB. Also the SSD drive needs to have 20% free of the new drives available ca 230GB so that took me down to below 200GB.
After setup I ran the Samsung Magician software that is also included. There you can test performance and do optimizations. I have yet to figure out the various settings but enabling something called Rapid mode gave my benchmark tests a real boost.
Magician also reports that my laptop does not support SATA 3 (6Gb/s) hence not being able to use maximum performance of the SSD drive but that actually does not bother me as it is anyway superfast!
Some more info on SSD and Samsung software can be found here.
Conclusion: If you, like I did, don’t think SSD will do that much for your laptop (or desktop for that matter) – think again!
I recently had a RAID daesstir, started off with 2 250G barracudas in AID0. When new, based on the published MTBF of the drives it was theoretically more reliable than many single drives, just like every non techie in the world gets in their off the shelf PC. So I wasn’t concerned and as before, continued the monthly backup of my documents and photos.It was when you started tweeting about AID0 last month I realised this array was now 4.5 years old I decided to throw another drive in and migrate to RAID5 while upgrading the machine for Portal 2, this is where the cock up occurred.When I plugged in the new drive I didn’t seat the power cable for one of the old drives fully. The machine boots and says the array is offline, and apparently when I went into the Intel RAID config dealie it writes config data, and prevents the array working when I plug the drive back in. So without any hard disk failure the array has been blown away, all because of a glitchy controller software.Turns out I didn’t need the backup thus time because I was able to use some RAID recovery tools, which saved me copying my music back to the machine and loosing a lot of TV series and films.I don’t think any RAID with the cheap controllers you get in PCs can be considered safe. The backups on my new RAID 5 array shall continue.