Highly recommended upgrade for those with older PCs

[Leongsam]

If you're still using a clanky old mechanical hard drive, it's time you upgraded to one of these :

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID

Just installed mine yesterday. It took less than 3 minutes for the upgrade. Formatted, copied my old HDD over using CC Cloner and rebooted.

The difference was stunning! Everything is so much faster.

Highly recommended. The best upgrade I've ever done.

You don't need a large capacity as you don't copy all your data, images, videos onto this SSD drive. You use it for your applications only plus configure it as a scratch disk for those applications which need one.

 

[nutbush]

Re: Highly recommended upgrade for those with 4 year old PCs

i am using mirroring raid for 2 X 500GB mechanical HD. if one down, another kick in...no need hassle for trying to restore data.

 

[Leongsam]

Re: Highly recommended upgrade for those with 4 year old PCs

i am using mirroring raid for 2 X 500GB mechanical HD. if one down, another kick in...no need hassle for trying to restore data.

I use a mechanical RAID array as backup too. This SSD Isn't for backup or storage. It's for running applications at blazing speeds because it uses the fastest bus your computer has.

With a mirroring set up, you still need another backup routine because whatever ends up corrupted is mirrored too. If one of your precious databases crashes, both copies on both RAID drives will be stuffed. That's when you need an older uncorrupted copy that you can restore from.

 

[nutbush]

Re: Highly recommended upgrade for those with 4 year old PCs

on MAC or PC?

I use a mechanical RAID array as backup too. This SSD Isn't for backup or storage. It's for running applications at blazing speeds because it uses the fastest bus your computer has.

 

[virus]

Re: Highly recommended upgrade for those with 4 year old PCs

I use a mechanical RAID array as backup too. This SSD Isn't for backup or storage. It's for running applications at blazing speeds because it uses the fastest bus your computer has.

With a mirroring set up, you still need another backup routine too because whatever ends up corrupted is mirrored too. If one of your precious databases crashes, both copies on both RAID drives will be stuffed.

nowadays still got pple use PC meh?

 

[Leongsam]

Re: Highly recommended upgrade for those with 4 year old PCs

on MAC or PC?

I'm using the term PC generically. It works for both. I installed it on my 2010 Mac Pro tower.

 

[Leongsam]

Re: Highly recommended upgrade for those with 4 year old PCs

nowadays still got pple use PC meh?

Anyone who does photo/video stuff plus graphic design etc will be on a desktop. It can't be done on tablets. You're talking 50Gb of data to process for one photoshoot.

My camera produces an 50 Mb file. When transferred to photoshop and you'r working with 7 layers plus layer masks plus plug ins etc, it bloats the file to 150 Mb. There is no way a tablet or laptop could handle these.

 

[virus]

Re: Highly recommended upgrade for those with 4 year old PCs

alienware cannot meh?

 

[Leongsam]

Re: Highly recommended upgrade for those with 4 year old PCs

alienware cannot meh?

Alienware would do the job I'm sure but aren't those custom designed for gaming?

They're now just DELL computers pimped with sci-fi special effects lighting.

 

[revealer]

Re: Highly recommended upgrade for those with 4 year old PCs

One can do an upgrade for about $160/= with a 256GB SSD from Transcend. It come with 3 years local warranty and also a free USB. So far so good as far as performance is concerned when compare to the mechanical drives..

http://skyjuiceiswater.blogspot.sg/2014/05/transcend-ssd340-review.html

 

[Big Sexy]

not sure if my main board can support that..
i have not got myself a new pc for 4-5 years now.
but i will sure take a look at it. thanks sam

If you're still using a clanky old mechanical hard drive, it's time you upgraded to one of these :

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID

 

[Leongsam]

Re: Highly recommended upgrade for those with 4 year old PCs

One can do an upgrade for about $160/= with a 256GB SSD from Transcend. It come with 3 years local warranty and also a free USB. So far so good as far as performance is concerned when compare to the mechanical drives..

http://skyjuiceiswater.blogspot.sg/2014/05/transcend-ssd340-review.html

For desktops, it is best to mount in a PCI slot as the data bus is capable of 800 Mb/s

 

[revealer]

If one's desktop has an I-series CPU (i3, i5,i7), one will have a good chance to use SSD at maximum speed as their motherboards would have 6 GB/s interface for hard disk. Even if you have older CPU like E-series (E2600, E5200, E8400) running on 3 GB/s motherboard, one can still see big improvement and might not notice the slight deteriorated performance unless one started to measure them. SSD are SATA drives and therefore, it would not work for those with IDE interface that was used in much older computers like those used in the Pentium 4 series. I have a E-series now running with Samsung EVO 840 using 3 GB/s interface. Have tried to mount the SSD in a 6GB/s PCIE card but did not find better result eventhough I had the card installed on the PCIex16 slot as recommended. This is because the E-series motherboards has only a 16 bits video bus and when one has a video card as well as 6 GB/s PCIE card installed, they will have to share the same 16 bits bandwidth and therefore, degraded the performance

not sure if my main board can support that..
i have not got myself a new pc for 4-5 years now.
but i will sure take a look at it. thanks sam

 

[Dark Knight]

IMHO, PCIe SSD drive is fast and good in performance but the price is still sky high.
For the time being can only afford SATA SSD.

 

[johnny333]

Have been using an Intel SSD & I find that over time it will slow down. Maybe have to a reformat & do a clean install to get the full benefit

Even with the slower speed it's pretty fast & on my next upgrade I will get a larger SSD.

 

[Leongsam]

Have been using an Intel SSD & I find that over time it will slow down. Maybe have to a reformat & do a clean install to get the full benefit

Even with the slower speed it's pretty fast & on my next upgrade I will get a larger SSD.

The reason why it slows down is because one of the weaknesses of the earlier generation of SSDs is that bad blocks start developing far more quickly compared to mechanical platters. The firmware would detect these and would then go through a complicated iteration process to transfer the data to other blocks and the write process would also have to avoid using the bad blocks.

The new enterprise grade of SSDs are of much higher quality and lots of "over provisioning" and the chances of bad blocks is a lot lower plus the firmware is now much more intelligent and avoiding these bad blocks, if they do occur, is a much speedier process.

There is a good article at http://www.forensicmag.com/articles/2014/01/solid-state-drives-part-4

 

[syed putra]

My desktop and laptop more than 10 years old. Worth the upgrade?

 

[Leongsam]

My desktop and laptop more than 10 years old. Worth the upgrade?

Probably not as there would be so many other bottlenecks in your data bus that there would be no speed gains.

 

[johnny333]

My desktop and laptop more than 10 years old. Worth the upgrade?

With hardware being so cheap I think you will get a bigger bang by replacing your PC instead of just upgrading to a SSD.

If you are considering upgrading to fiber internet , the newer PCs support gigabit networking.