Category Archives: SSD

Where Are The Desktop SSD’s?

SSD, storage, USB, vista, Windows, ,

Windows logo blueI have a Compaq desktop PC that’s a few years old that is handy for tasks such as doing taxes or writing articles with. Unfortunately, it came with Windows Vista. More than a year ago I installed an inexpensive 128 gigabyte SSD in it. The SSD sped things up dramatically to the point where Vista was actually usable. To be honest, apart from being a bit of a resource hog, Vista has been quite stable on this machine.

While doing my 2016 taxes I received an on-screen Microsoft notification warning me that the Vista “End of Life” date is April 11, 2017. That presented me with a dilemma. Should I pay for the upgrade to update the Compaq to Windows 10? Or, should I just replace the machine with a newer model that came with Windows 10 preinstalled?

If I were buying a new machine, I would insist on an SSD. Unfortunately, after a bit of looking, it seems that desktop computers with factory-installed SSD’s are as rare as hens teeth and if they are offered at all they tend to be on the pricey side.

The other problem is that the old LCD monitor that’s attached to the Compaq is VGA only. I would have to also have an HDMI to VGA adapter unless I wanted to replace a perfectly functional monitor.

PC manufacturers complain that PC’s just aren’t selling very well. Have they ever thought about the fact that the models they are offering for sale tend to be mediocre? How about offering a $500 desktop tower that has a reasonable processor, a reasonable amount of RAM, and a 128 or 256 SSD?

Is that too much to ask?

In my opinion the SSD offers one of the biggest performance boosts of any upgrade ever, and yet PC manufacturers seem to be mindlessly failing to utilize it to excite consumers with. I’m afraid it doesn’t make any sense. Why should the consumer get excited about machines slowly booting from spinning hard drives that offer performance that is, from a perception standpoint, not that much different from the Windows machines on sale in the same stores a decade ago?

The only excuse for the lack of SSD-equipped desktop PC’s that seems to be offered is that customers “expect” one terabyte or larger drives on which to store massive amounts of pictures, music, etc. I don’t know if that is true or not. Personally, I stopped storing my stuff on my computer hard drives starting upwards of three years ago. I use a network-attached, Internet-savvy Western Digital MyCloud drive to store all of my digital stuff on. I also employ multiple inexpensive large spinning drives as redundant back-up drives. All of my 8,000 plus pictures are additionally stored with Google Photos for instant access to every picture I’ve ever taken right from my phone. I use my computers as creation and manipulation tools and NOT as mass storage devices.

In the end, I opted to go the cheaper route and buy a copy of Windows 10. It came on a USB thumb drive. It installed just fine on the Compaq. Everything seems to work, with the exception of an old Canon scanner that Canon offers no Windows 10 driver for. The loss of the Canon scanner is not a problem since my HP all-in-one WiFi printer can handle any flatbed scanning needs I might have. It did a large Windows update, and I installed a couple of things such as Dropbox and TurboTax 2016. The Compaq won’t win any speed competitions, but it’s poised to continue to do chores such as taxes until October 14, 2025, Windows 10’s scheduled end of life date. By then it might be time for a new computer.

Aleratec Hard Drive Duplicator at CES

ces, Hard Drive, Interview, Special Media, SSD, video, , , , , , ,

Aleratec LogoLet’s been honest, it’s not often that the average geek needs to duplicate a single hard drive to five others in a range of physical sizes and capacities. But if you did need to do it, Aleratec have the machine for the job with the snappily named 1-to-5 HDD Copy Dock Advanced. Jamie and Todd find out what it offers from Perry Solomon, President and CEO of Aleratec.

The Aleratec 1-to-5 duplicates one SATA drive to five others, taking both spinning disks and SSDs while catering for both 3.5″ and 2.5″ form factors without any additional adaptors. In itself, that’s not particularly amazing as Aleratec do other units that will duplicate 24 HDDs at once, but this working prototype has a couple of features that set it apart. First, it has a secure erase function which will wipe disks to Dept. of Defense standards, but more impressively, the 1-to-5 has the capability to duplicate from a larger drive capacity to a smaller drive capacity. This situation often occurs when moving from an HDD to an SSD where the HDD has a volume capacity in a terabytes but the SSD has only gigabytes. Obviously the files on the source drive have to be pruned to fit the space on the receiving drive but it’s a great feature on a duplicator.

The price of the 1-to-5 HDD Copy Dock Advanced is $899 and will be available shortly.

Interview by Jamie Davis of Health Tech Weekly and Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central for the TechPodcast Network.

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Digital Curmudgeon

Bargain, Hard Drive, Hardware, Information, Operating Systems, SSD, ,

EEEPC-SSDThere’s a dirty little secret about computer performance that is hiding within plain sight. A solid state drive (SSD) will take almost any machine manufactured within the past five to ten years and give it a massive performance boost.

I have an Asus 1000HE EEEPC Netbook from four or five years ago. It came with a 160 gigabyte 5900 RPM conventional spinning hard drive. With the conventional hard drive, the computer was painfully slow to boot up and to use. It would take the better part of 10 minutes to completely boot up and become usable.

I installed a 120 gigabyte Crucial M500 SSD drive into it and restored the operating system (Windows XP SP3) from the original system DVD that came with the machine. After installing the software I will be using with the machine, including Adobe Audition 1.5 and MS Office XP, it completely boots up and is 100% usable within 30 seconds! Programs load immediately and windows snap to attention.

I use this machine as a handy backup machine to an older SSD-equipped white plastic Macbook. The Asus Netbook doesn’t take up much room when I’m traveling. I realize that XP is no longer being supported by Microsoft, but I want to hang on to the perfectly functional older software such as Adobe Audition 1.5 that really has no modern equivalent that I like nearly as well. I am not browsing or doing email with this machine, so it should be perfectly safe to continue to use well into the future.

The move to mobile has caused me to shift away from relying much on traditional computers. During the last year I have used my computers only to record podcasts with. Email and browsing are handled exclusively on mobile devices.

In recent years I’ve grown increasingly annoyed by the constant upgrade cycle drumbeat. It seems there is always some fix or some new supposedly “must have” version of virtually every piece of hardware and software. Why upgrade? “Better performance” and/or “better security” are almost always the answers that are either given or implied. Often I find that NOT to be the case.

Operating system updates end up destroying existing software and hardware compatabilities. Sometimes software that won’t work on a new version of an operating system is never updated or replaced, and the functionality is simply lost.

So, if you have an older machine, including both Windows and Mac, depending on what you are using it for, if you want to hold on to perfectly functional older hardware and software, installing an SSD into an older machine can give it an incredible performance boost that will blow away any brand new machine that is not equipped with an SSD drive. Also, SSD prices contine to go down. A 120 gigabyte Crucial M500 drive now sells for about $72 dollars on Amazon, making it one amazing inexpensive upgrade that offers the absolute most bang possible for the buck!