Pointers on adding a SSD

[jerH]

I have a big Samsung laptop that actually has a second internal drive bay. The pre-installed hard drive is a 1TB drive. I'm looking at getting a small-ish (256 gb?) SSD drive to put in the second bay to hold the OS. I'm not looking to spend a whole lot, but I also don't want to skimp my way into something that's not much of an improvement. I'd been looking at the Crucial MX100 256 gb SSD. Anyone have any better ideas? Also, what's the best way to accomplish the migration? Backup/wipe/reinstall? Thanks!

 

[Hazinator]

Hello there,
SSD is quick for startups so it is a good idea to put regularly used programmes on there. Startup times should be a lot quicker... The SSD you picked is a recommended one as a few of my friends use it for slow computers. They improve quite a bit in startup times. If you don't mind spending the money on getting one, I would. If your just doing it for the sake of it, just to make the startup times slightly quicker, its not worth having one. I would personally backup my files onto an external hard drive and reinstall them onto your new ssd and hard drive. It is really up to you if you get one or not as they do make a relatively good difference. By the way is your laptop slow or fast?

 

[jerH]

It's a pretty fast laptop...a little over a year old. Core i7 3630QM CPU @2.4GHz and 8 gig of RAM. Faster startup would be cool. I'm also hoping that it will speed up the runtimes of some MatLab simulations that I'm running to work on a PhD. They run lots (thousands) of iterations and each iteration writes out a small amount of data to capture results. The sim is multi-threaded so that each core can run an independent execution, but they write to a single results file (it's easier that way) so they spend a fair amount of time waiting to grab the file....

I think I'm going to follow your suggestion and back up my personal files and then reinstall windows on the SSD. It will mean re-installing a lot of third-party software, but I read bad things about trying to clone your old partition onto a SSD.

 

[Hazinator]

I would get a professional person to do this, just in case. Any other questions you would like to ask me. An SSD would allow you to transfer files quicker so an SSD would be good for getting a PhD as it allows you to create files and transfer them quickly. One thing I would say is that a 2.4ghz for an i7 may not allow you to do so many things at once. You may need a faster processor in the future.