Replacing HD with SSD

[nakatago]

I've been mulling about this for some time but I guess I'm too lazy and too cheap to do it yet.

I cloned my laptop HD this weekend and Clonezilla told me my HD has some physical errors "due to handling." This must be a sign that I should go ahead with the replacement soon.

Any thoughts or recommended SSDs? I haven't looked but I guess my laptop takes SATA II, 2.5" and I'm pretty confident the laptop can boot from an SSD. I currently have a 500 GB HD and a DVD writer on it. I was thinking I could put in an SSD and then put the HD in the optical drive bay since I don't remember the last time I needed a DVD drive. There should be external enclosures for optical drives or at least can be connected using the insides of a HD enclosure, right?

Anyway, I'm just throwing around ideas so feel free to chime in.

[QRM]

from a desk top point of view, I just unplugged the old HD and plugged in the new samsung SSD, fired it up loaded windows 7 up and all worked fine.

[x9200]

I use some ssds but apart from mac air, there are not in the laptops so first, what is it you are looking for by switching to an ssd? Booting speed (shortens a lot), battery savings (no idea, it should)?

I have OCZ-VERTEX2 (128GB, for energy saving) in a general server running for 2 years 24/7 at this point with no problems so far; Kingspec C3000 (64GB) in a NAS (to limit the power-on hdd spinning-on current as there are multiple 3.5" drives there) and more recently Kingston V300 (120GB) in a multimedia authoring desktop mostly because Amazon sold them ridiculously cheap (~SGD 60) - ubuntu boots in 10-15s with it.

[x9200]

There is no difference in logical behavior of ssd as compared to the standard drive. What I did to transfer windows7 from an old 1GB hdd to the 120sdd was:
1. vacated the space on the win7 partition to 80GB occupancy or so.
2. shrunk the ntfs and the partition size using the win7 internal admin software
3. partitioned the ssd so it had exactly the same partition size as in the old hdd after shrinking (sectors/sizes/heads was the same).
4. dd copied directly the partition from hdd to ssd.
5. installed grub on the ssd

After this win7 just booted without any complaints.
If you have a single OS on the drive or/and the partition/disk sizes match I would just copy the whole drive (dd if=/dev/sdx of=/dev/sdy bs=10240 or similar).

[nakatago]

I use some ssds but apart from mac air, there are not in the laptops so first, what is it you are looking for by switching to an ssd? Booting speed (shortens a lot), battery savings (no idea, it should)?

I have OCZ-VERTEX2 (128GB, for energy saving) in a general server running for 2 years 24/7 at this point with no problems so far; Kingspec C3000 (64GB) in a NAS (to limit the power-on hdd spinning-on current as there are multiple 3.5" drives there) and more recently Kingston V300 (120GB) in a multimedia authoring desktop mostly because Amazon sold them ridiculously cheap (~SGD 60) - ubuntu boots in 10-15s with it.

I want the speed in every day usage and the confidence I can move my laptop without damaging any platters. If I do decide to make the HD as secondary, I'd use it for data that I don't access as much but access more often than any off-device storage.

My laptop's energy usage is pretty ok so I guess savings would be a welcome bonus. Ubuntu 14.04 was a significant improvement in battery life.

If/when I get an SSD, I'll probably time it for 14.10; I feel that I've mucked around my OS install too much and I could use the timing for a fresh start to get rid of the accumulated cruft (on the installation partition; home is fine).

I'd occasionally see deals on Intel and Samsung SSDs and maybe I could finally jump at the chance next time.

[x9200]

This 10-15s boot is for 14.04, pretty standard installation. You should see a very nice improvement. It is even better pronounced (for some reason) than for the win7 I have on the same drive. This pc is with 8GB RAM so I don't see too much improvement when it comes to memory swapping but I would expect this should also nicely improve if the physical RAM gets eaten.

All the ssds I mentioned are low end it still nicely shows.
This is for the NAS:

/dev/sdb: (SSD)
Timing cached reads: 5336 MB in 1.99 seconds = 2677.70 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 1262 MB in 3.00 seconds = 420.34 MB/sec

/dev/sdc: (WD green 2TB)
Timing cached reads: 4990 MB in 1.99 seconds = 2503.31 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 434 MB in 3.01 seconds = 144.12 MB/sec

[nakatago]

This 10-15s boot is for 14.04, pretty standard installation. You should see a very nice improvement. It is even better pronounced (for some reason) than for the win7 I have on the same drive. This pc is with 8GB RAM so I don't see too much improvement when it comes to memory swapping but I would expect this should also nicely improve if the physical RAM gets eaten.

All the ssds I mentioned are low end it still nicely shows.
This is for the NAS:

/dev/sdb: (SSD)
Timing cached reads: 5336 MB in 1.99 seconds = 2677.70 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 1262 MB in 3.00 seconds = 420.34 MB/sec

/dev/sdc: (WD green 2TB)
Timing cached reads: 4990 MB in 1.99 seconds = 2503.31 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 434 MB in 3.01 seconds = 144.12 MB/sec

That is sweet.

I wouldn't worry about Win7 as I have it on a VM only because sometimes, I really need to use Windows but not often enough for me to install it in its own partition.

[x9200]

You will have it a bit less as this NAS is Sata 3 but still it should be visible I believe.

[durain]

SSD definitely speed things up, especially during startup and reboot. traders used to moan when they need to reboot their PC, now with SSD, they dont mind as it is super fast!








p/s just dont defrag your SSD! even tech guys do the same mistake!

[zzm9980]

p/s just dont defrag your SSD! even tech guys do the same mistake!

It won't immediately cause major problems, it just doesn't help either.

Theoretically you're putting more wear on the chips I guess... but most people won't notice.

[nakatago]

SSD definitely speed things up, especially during startup and reboot. traders used to moan when they need to reboot their PC, now with SSD, they dont mind as it is super fast!








p/s just dont defrag your SSD! even tech guys do the same mistake!

The latest Linux Kernel already has TRIM on commercial distros.

[x9200]

There is still a benefit of releasing some space but no idea how significant in average this is.