Oct 31st 2013
Know How... 67
Trick or Treat! Choosing an SSD and Iyaz's Favorite Tech Pranks
Hosted by
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ
A special Halloween episode full of tech pranks, and all you need to know when choosing a SSD.
New episodes every Thursday at 2:00pm Eastern / 11:00am Pacific / 18:00 UTC.
Guests:
Iyaz Akhtar
A special Halloween episode full of tech pranks, and all you need to know when choosing a SSD.
Upgrading to SSD!
Step 1: Choose your SSD
Look for Capacity and your Price Point
- Typically you'll see price price linearity between 64-256GB, then jumps between 512GB and 1TB.
- Up to 256GB youíll typically see prices in the $0.50-$1.00 per Gigabyte range, depending on performance.
- After 256GB you can see prices in the $0.75-$2.00 per Gigabyte Range.
- This is more important for laptops than desktops since there is USUALLY only a single slot for HDD/SDD in a laptop. In a Desktop you could run multiple SSDs or SSD/HD combos.
- Padreís "Sweet Spot" is at 256GB
Look for Format:
- MOST SSDs come in the 2.5" format ñ though the thickness may vary. (Typically 7mm and 9.5mm)
- There are also SSDs in mSATA and PCIe formats, and their performance can be INCREDIBLE, but theyíre not usually in the realm of the casual upgrade.
- Make sure to CHECK YOUR COMPUTER to see if it's thickness limited.
Look for Speed
- You want SATA 3, which tops out at 6Gbps.
- Speed is important, but not the ONLY thing you should consider.
- You want a SSD with above 450MB/s sustained read/write.
- MAKE SURE TO CHECK THE WRITE SPEEDS!
Look for Reliability
- 1 Million MTBF is the norm.
- You want something with wear-leveling.
- The reliability of a SSD isn't determined by the number of hours it can run, but by the number of times it can write to the flash cells in the memory. (The P/E or "Program/Erase" cycle)
- A 3-year warranty is the minimum.
Look for Speed over Time
- This is the big one: All SSDs get slower as their flash cells start to "wear out" ñ You want a drive that properly "over provisions" their drive, setting aside 7% or more of their total capacity to replace bad and worn cells.
- Look for a drive that tells you its TBW or "Total Bytes Written"
- The Kingston KC300 can do 188TB TBW (Total Bytes Written) before it fails
- Even if you were to write 100GB a day, it would take you roughly 8 years to wear out the drive
Step 2: Clone or Fresh Install?
Both Iyaz and Padre suggest that you do a fresh installation to take full advantage of the speed increase of your new SSDIf you plan on doing a fresh installation
- Finding your original disks or Make Backups from your in-OS Recovery Management software
- Backup data files (not program files)
- If your computer uses WiFi/Ethernet device drivers that are NOT automatically installed with the new OS, make sure to download them ahead of time and have them available on a device that a fresh OS can read. (i.e. USB Flash Drive)
- If youíre installing the SSD in a laptop/desktop without an optical drive, either get an external Optical Drive or burn the ISOs into a bootable format on an external hard drive/USB Flash Drive.
- DO IT!
If you plan on cloning your installation
- Make sure you buy the ìkitî version of whatever SSD you choose. (i.e. The Kingston KC300) ñ The Kit should include mounting gear, cables, a USB transfer device and software to clone your drive.
- If the total amount of data on the HDD is more than the total storage available on the SSD, you need to remove files from the HDD until you get below the total storage available on the SSD.
- Follow the Instructions on your Kit