SSD for Desktop

The PSU fried in my Best Buy bought Gateway i3 two years ago, and it did a number on the HDD that came with it. A year later I replaced the control board on the HDD, only somewhat recovering lost data. Whatever, that's old new these days.

I had an old pre-SATA PSU sitting around as well as a 10,000rpm WD Raptor that I decided to use as the boot drive for Windows 7, and its been humming along fine for the last two years. Downside? It's a small drive (only 70gb) and its full. It's also old and loud, constantly spinning.

I've got the better part of 2.25tb of storage (1tb USB3, two 500gb HDDs), so I don't need a lot of storage, but I want the computer as quiet as possible.

I'd like to make the move to a 256gb SSD. I assume with some 4-pin-to-SATA power adapters I can power it, hook it up, clone my existing HDD boot drive, and swap the two, right?

EDIT: My other worry is that the older PSU which is now at least 12 year old will fail, frying my new SSD and other storage devices. Is there some way to keep that from happening? Are there secondary fuse blocks that I can connect the PSU to, and then from that device power the SATA devices? Isolating the storage from the PSU power?

PSUs almost never take out parts when they fail, unless that failure was due to some kind of power surge hitting it. But that's a current source problem.

You've got the upgrade procedure pretty much correct although exactly how you do the "cloning" matters. The destination partition will be bigger than the source (assuming a typical scenario where you only want one) so it's not a straight imaging job.

Make sure you make VERY regular backups with an SSD - it's the second most dangerous form of storage, more dangerous than RAID0 and slightly safer than a RAMdisk. When they fail, you get zero warning and the data is usually unrecoverable.

GameboyRMH pretty much described the typical failure mode for SSDs. I've seen this several times at work (just had to replace another disk because of it) - if you get any errors or weird behaviour from an SSD, back up what you can immediately as it's toast.

The good news is that the new generations of SSD are much more long lived.

decent PSUs may not. but if you have one that you are either unknowingly exceeding its thermal capacity, or its caps are garbage, it definitely can cause problems.

age in of itself is not the enemy, just heat and wear.

however, it wont fry it just because its old. Do a thorough inspection of it while you have things apart. pull it out, shine a light inside on the caps to make sure they're clean and flat-topped, look for stains on the circuit board, vacuum the little bugger and clear the vents, all that kind of thing.

ssds rule, btw. will it be your first?

It will.

Sometimes I wonder if there wasn't a surge that took out the PSU and old HDD because I didn't have the computer plugged into a surge protector.

unlikely. power supplies tend to handle most power surge events from the service just fine, especially most modern ones that are international design to operate at double the US volts.

anything bad enough to seriously exceed the power supply's capability on the service line even for a moment would have likely tripped a breaker.

just inspect it for obvious problems. you can get a power supply tester for peace of mind too.

basic one for under $10 confirms good output voltage. http://www.amazon.com/Insten%C2%AE-24-pin-Power-Supply-Tester/dp/B005CTCD6S

I put anything I want to keep on a UPS. Laptop, desktop, TV, DVD player, security cams, anything I value. I buy the replacement batteries and keep them in stock in the shop fridge.

And, ahh... SDD's go bad. Don't think the technology is there yet. From what I hear, not from personal experience, so call it "net wisdom." And my friend says that if you get a SDD, put the OS on it and set EVERYTHING up to read only on it so that nothing is using it for temp, etc., and that way you can get some life out of them.

Related question: what's the best FOSS solution for full clone backup of an SSD these days? I've got one on my desktop (Win7) that I should probably clone just in case.

Dr. Hess wrote: ...buy the replacement batteries and keep them in stock in the shop fridge.

just make sure you return them to ambient temps before you use them ;p

And, ahh... SDD's go bad.

SSDs are very reliable, they have no moving parts to mechanically fail, are immune to magnetic interference, mechanical shock or head reading/writing failures, draw a fraction of the power that a mechanical drive needs, and studies show their annual failure rates are lower than mechanical drives.

but all hard drives can go bad, so back up only what you dont want to lose forever. and typically, SSD failures are total losses.

In reply to 02Pilot:

you checked out Clonezilla?

I used SDD for the boot drive on the big 3D CAD workstation I built last winter w/ a pretty fast HDD for the storage. So far I love it. Boots practically instantly and the thing has been very stable. And it cost about 1/4 what the same stuff from BOXX would have been. Also, Newegg is evil.

02Pilot wrote: Related question: what's the best FOSS solution for full clone backup of an SSD these days? I've got one on my desktop (Win7) that I should probably clone just in case.

Depends on what you want to do, exactly. If you really want to make image backups and you want to use FOSS, there's dd...but what I use to backup my Win7 gaming PC is robocopy + vshadow:

http://ithelp.cveg.uark.edu/IT_Help/Documents_files/backup.pdf

In effect it's very similar to using rsync to backup a Linux computer. This way I can backup the PC while the OS is running and easily access individual files in the backup, no big image files required. Only downsides are that if you're doing a bare-metal restore you have to use a Windows install CD to reinstall your bootloader, and you have to backup to an NTFS partition to preserve permissions.

I'm not a big fan of image backups in general - if the disk you're restoring to is smaller or significantly bigger than the one the back up came from, they instantly become a PITA. And they preserve any fragmentation from your source disk, how is that good?

motomoron wrote: Also, Newegg is evil.

How so? I've never had any problems with them.

GameboyRMH wrote:

motomoron wrote: Also, Newegg is evil.

How so? I've never had any problems with them.

They tend to raise the price, then offer a deep-looking "discount" back down to the original price. Not sure that qualifies as "evil" but it's something I'm aware that they do.

On the other side, they fight patent trolls, which is nice.

I only have good things to say about both Newegg and SSDs.. I'm a higher-demand CAD/CAM jockey, and I'd rather have a 5 year old workstation with an SSD than a brand new machine with a platter drive. Anecdotally, I've seen much less failures in the past 5 years from SSDs than mechanical drives, and I still maintain a few servers for old customers and work at an IT company that has 300+ machines spinning each day, so I see a lot go through.

I don't trust any storage device further than I can throw it, but SSDs are lighter, have no mechanical parts and run cooler, so I can throw them a lot further...

That's my biggest problem. I just can't figure out how to adequately configure a regularly schedule backup, nor can I tell windows that by default, stop saving things to the boot drive!

All my computers have backup scripts that I start manually, but I'm l33t

Maybe you could try Windows' included backup tool:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/back-up-restore-faq#1TC=windows-7