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SSD Replacement
indojabijin
Member UncommonPosts: 97
in Hardware
My little 64gb Crucial M4 from 3 years ago is running it's course. I keep no games on it with Windows 8.1 with about 30-35gb free of space. It works like a charm.
I've now come to the point where I would like to have a few games on my SSD along with my OS but 64GB isn't enough. I need a recommendation for a 256gb hard drive. I would prefer reliability/quality over performance, SSDs are fast enough.
Also, I do not have a copy of Windows 8/7 as this is a build from a few years ago and I got a free upgrade to Windows 8 through my old job.... would I have to repurchase it?
Comments
Assuming that you mean somewhere in the ballpark of 256 GB (as in, 256 GB of physical NAND flash on the drive, but a little less actually available to you rather than for error correction and such), this will do the job:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148694
So long as you have a legal Windows license for your current computer, changing the SSD won't change that. You can upgrade anything except the motherboard without invalidating the license, even if you end up having to do a complete reinstall of the OS.
It might be simpler for you to just keep the OS on the old SSD and put everything else on the new one. But buying a new SSD is also a convenient time to do a complete reinstall and clear out years worth of accumulated junk. You could try doing what I did when I replaced my SSD a year ago: keep the old one plugged in, install Windows on the new, copy data over directly as needed, leave both SSDs in place for a couple of weeks, and finally pull out the old one when I was satisfied that the new one was working well.
Just a side note - Quiz, your link goes through as intended, but it's getting re-routed through redirectingat.com via Skimlinks... this site is back to it's old tricks. idk how long it's been doing that but I just noticed it here.
The mouseover tool tip on your link looks fine, but when you copy and paste the url, it's really sending you to:
http://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66557X1509351&site=mmorpg.com&xs=1&isjs=1&url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148694&xguid=e8c33c25ab283099d1b2f74af9c11e47&xcreo=0&xed=0&sref=http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/6507162/thread/423464#6507162&pref=http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/423464/postAction/reply&xtz=480&abp=1
https://go.redirectingat.com/
The SSD is great, I just really wanted to comment about Skimlinks being back ><
I'm a huge opponent of cheap HTML tricks. At least be up front about it.
I actually asked about that a while ago.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/421348/Roundabout-link-redirects.html
The answer was, yes, it's intentional and the site does that to get some revenue. But I don't have a problem with it, as the link does go to the right place, and it's much less obtrusive than a lot of other methods of getting revenue.
They should at least let you know and see the full URL that the skimlink is going to... tricks like that are how a lot of malware get installed.
In the case of reinstalling Windows would I need to have a physical copy of it? I'm unsure if I still have my original Windows 7 disc from a few years ago. If I don't have anything how would I reinstall?
My windows 8 upgrade was just a code that I no longer have.
You can download Windows 8 ISO from Microsoft.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media
You do need that code though - that is the important part. If you've totally lost it, there are ways you can dig that code out of your registry/UEFI
https://superuser.com/questions/495794/how-to-find-windows-8-product-key
You don't have to reinstall if you don't want to. A fresh copy of Windows never hurts, but if you want to keep your current installation, you would need to use a disk migration tool. Acronis used to be bundled with one of the brands of SSDs. I thought it was Crucial's SSDs that included it.
Is your current SSD actually going bad, or is it just too small for you to use? A SMART program like Crystal Disk Info should be able to tell you if it is going bad. If the drive is fine but just too small, you could keep using it and install a second SSD for the purposes of installing games on it.
That. If your current SSD still works, no point getting through all the hassle of reinstalling. Just install games on your new SSD, you could buy a smaller 128gb to reduce cost.Try this program, there are others as well that can provide your wins product key
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/rockxp.html
I also was able to change my motherboard and cpu out and told microsoft is was the same computer, just upgrading some hardware and they allowed my to carry the os onto the new system build. without lying.
My perfer ssd is samsung 's pro editions. I use 128 for os and use other ssd for games. You could just add another ssd and just install games on that, and not worry about redoing your os. You can go to control panel and click on recovery folder and make a a recovery drive off of a usb stick, and refresh and reset you pc. gl
My current SSD is fine. I could just buy a 256 SSD and pop it in there. That wouldn't be a problem. My current SSD is just small.
And Quiz, is there a specific reason for suggesting the M500 vs the MX100? Other than reliability in the length of time people have owned these drives.
Because it was cheaper when I linked it.
Your SSD probably uses SATA. Most SSDs do, though not all.
Today, 1 TB of SSD storage costs about $400. I'd expect that to be $200 within a few years, and under $100 by the end of this decade. Depending on how well V-NAND catches on, it wouldn't be that shocking to see a 2 TB SSD for $100 by the end of the decade, even.
And yes, prices for a given capacity are falling. I bought a 120 GB SSD for $300 before rebate in 2009--and that was very much a budget model. Today, you can get 480 GB for cheaper than that, easily.
But it does not follow that you'll someday be able to get a perfectly good 240 GB SSD for $30. There are intrinsic costs to building an SSD apart from the NAND, and you need some minimum number of NAND chips (typically eight) to get the proper performance. Die shrinks let you build chips with double the capacity of before at about the same cost, but don't give you the same capacity as before at half the cost unless you were already well above the minimum size that works.
SSD manufacturers will do the same thing hard drive manufacturers do: stop making smaller capacity drives. Four years ago, 3.5" 500GB drives were common and cheap. Now, they are relics of the past and likely no longer manufactured.
I remember reading that die space was a major barrier in SSD capacity. Shrinking the process allowed more data to be stored on the same size chip, but resulted in lower write durability. V-NAND is supposed to change things by allowing manufacturers to take up vertical space instead of designing everything on a 2-D plane.
V-NAND won't be without limitations, though. A 2.5" drive form factor isn't very big. It is hard to accurately guess how many layers they will be able to fit in the limited space without knowing a lot more about how the V-NAND is made. We may see the limit at around 8TB or it might peak out in the hundreds of TB.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007603%20600003290&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=30
Really?
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You're thinking far too high level. A functional hard drive has to have at least one platter. It can have more, but it cannot have fewer. If that one platter can have 1 TB, then why do you make your single-platter hard drive smaller than that? Lower capacity platters made on older machinery will continue to be sold for a while, but eventually you just discontinue it.
I'd be very, very surprised if that's a meaningful limitation. When an entire transistor is mere hundreds of nanometers across, you'd have to stack an awful lot of them before the total thickness is noticeable at a macroscopic level. Cells probably aren't spaced the same in all three dimensions, but the 24-layer NAND chips in the Samsung 850 Pro don't look especially thick to the unaided eye.
Update: I decided to go for the MX100 512GB (for $199).
I will be upgrading or building a new PC within the next year as mine is nearing 4 years. What I'll do eventually is move this one drive to a new build and leave my computer with a single drive - compared to the 3 I have now (64GB SSD, 512GB SSD, and 1TB HDD).
I could fit everything into that ~500gb space.
What amazes me is that in 2011 I paid $160 for 64gb. Amazing how technology progresses.
The limitation isn't technical on the small size of the drive, it's totally financial. Quizzical alluded to it.
There are all these other costs associated with producing a drive (HDD Or SSD) - you have to R&D firmware (or license it, or both). You have to build a case, that case has to have an interface (typically SATA). That case will have a daughterboard on it of some sort.
And all that has a pretty set cost. You want to make some sort of margin on that cost, so the cost of whatever storage amount the market will bear above those costs in order to keep your profit margin (typically very slim in the consumer realm)
In practical terms, that floor on cost has been around $40 US. Not much goes far below that.
Just FYI to anyone that might find this info useful.. when i goto wipe and reinstall a computer.. there is a great program to find your windows key and a ton of other keys.. its called Keyfinder my magical jelly bean (just google magic jelly bean it the top result) it MUCH easyer to do it that way then tring to find the cd case with the key of it.. or read it off the side of the case ect..
I've been using it for years..
Also if when you reinstall windows if it come up saying key invalid (and you did infact type it in correctly) just use the activate by phone method.. you'll have to read a big long code to the automated phone thing.. they it will ask how many computer are installed with that key and you say 1 and they it will give you a code to enter to activate windows.... i've done a complete rebuilt of my system 3 times with the same win7 cd key (only had it installed on 1 computer at a time) and each time i've changed motherboard and cpu (went from a dual core AMD to quad core amd to a quad core intel)
I guess that's too many to conclude that 500GB hard drives are not manufactured. Still, smaller drives are difficult to find in the 3.5" form factor. It won't be much longer for the 500GB drives.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb-256gb-1tb-review-enter-the-3d-era/4
Here is an interesting article on V-NAND. It looks like Samsung is predicting 1-terrabit die capacity by 2017. That could potentially reach 64TB in a 2.5" form factor.
Before one makes a comment, do some reseach about TLC.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-the-endurance-of-tlc-nand
Test showed me that it has a livespan of 215 years with 10gb a day writing
(tested with 2 of them until they died)
Still the crucial last longer :P
My tip would be the Crucial MX1000 512Gb
Just got one myself after some reseach, fast, reliable, power out protection, MLC and cheap :P
Not necessarily.
One of my Samsung 830s failed last week. Luckily it was the one with only games on it and not the OS. Which is weird because the one that failed has had the same 4 games installed on it for over a year and was probably used less.
Get Sandisk DIMM SSD, they're cool, and mostly give decent advantages over classic ssd xD
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/193983-sandisks-dimm-based-ssd-benchmarked-and-its-a-monster-in-some-tasks
My recommendation:
Right now, ignore the differences in SSD Endurance (that associated with the limited number of write cycles). Do pay attention to early drive deaths.
The amount of data a consumer SSD can write before exhausting itself, even for the less hearty models, still puts them at lasting decades of normal use. They are far more likely to fail of something else (and that's what you want to pay attention to) before you finally exhaust out the NAND in them.
The average lifespan for a drive, even an SSD, still seems to be around 3-5 years. We're just seeing the first generation of SSDs hit that time frame, and failure data that has come across my desk and reading doesn't indicate that SSDs are that much different with regard to reliability than HDDs - when they just fail in a bit different manner.
But I've never seen one hit a write exhaust failure.