SSD advice - ***RESOLVED***

[jaye944]

Kinda doubling on from my i3 to i5 thread,

Going to upgrade my LT's HD to an SSD
so just a couple of questions on specs.

So my existing drive is
Toshiba MK6465GSX - hard drive - 640 GB - SATA-300 Series
(linky here)https://www.cnet.com/products/toshib...-series/specs/

Interested in
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB 2.5" 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SSD)
(linky) http://www.canadacomputers.com/produ...item_id=080111

The only thing I'm not sure about is the Interface
My one is listed as SATA 3 GB/s and the samsung at 6 Gb/s
is that ok ?

The SSD is also listed as SATA III

Should it just straight swap out?
The Samsung apparently comes with some cloning software

Also my LT has a SATA connector next to the USB?
Will that power the SSD when I'm cloning it, I do have a couple
of drive enclosures I could use?

Thanks again

[c1pher]

The 850 is pretty legendary. It’s almost all we use at work. We also have had good luck wth crucial ssd’s. They don’t seem as fast as the Samsungs though.

Yes it looks like plug and play.

[dzvero]

its backward compatible, will just be slower than using 6GB/s

[jaye944]

txs guy's appreciate it
will have a crack at it next few days

[amgraham]

The EVO is solid. Can't go wrong. Price is a little high to me, in the US, but I don't know what it would cost for shipping and then you have to pay VAT or whatever on it, right? Most of the more common name brand drives come with "cloning" software. There are also a couple good free ones you can download.

The eSATA connection is different than the regular SATA drive itself. The eSATA port should carry power but you'd need an eSATA to SATA cable/adapter. Alternatively, yeah you could stick it in the USB enclosure.

You'd mentioned the bloatware, etc. Personally, what I would do is take the opportunity to do a "clean" install, not "clone". I did that in the past when I upgraded the older machines around the house to SSD.

[jaye944]

txs man,
the bloatware was on my daughters win10 machine,
mine's been fine tuned.
I'm a bit loathe to do a clean install,
or that said.... as I'm swapping out my drive I could actually do that ?
mmm, I'll have to think on that...

The tosh didnt come with install disk, but I do have a image of it as a virgin machine and repair disc, I guess I could play around with that,

Im not going to loose anything, as my existing HDD is fine.

good idea

[amgraham]

If you have the key, which on that vintage of machine was still on the sticker typically on the bottom of the laptop, you can download Win 7 from MS. I know with Win 10, they give you a choice of downloading and ISO to burn to a DVD or it'll create USB media for you. Link is here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...nload/windows7

Just make sure you've got your ducks in a row first. Make sure you'll have access to the source installation media for your applications, or able to re-download them to re-install. I also typically grab the drivers from the OEM site and put them on a USB stick for easy reinstallation after you load the OS just in case it doesn't find them. NIC/Wifi drivers there are really the most important since, if you can get reconnected after the reinstall, you can grab anything else you might need.

I happen to like Win 10 but I understand some folks don't. I did this a couple of years ago with a decent HP all-in-one. I got it with a regular hard drive and Win 7. I wanted SSD with Win 10. I swapped them out and installed Win 10 from scratch on the SSD. Problem is... Win 10 wouldn't activate as the PC had never been upgraded to Win 10. It was still during the "free" upgrade period so... I put the regular drive back in, "Upgraded" to Win 10 which generates the "key". I then swapped the SSD back in and was able to install from scratch, and activate. I just didn't want the "upgrade" install. I wanted "clean".

[jaye944]

thanks man.

so as I have a working system, the key is already there
I have all the tosh drivers on the HD, but as I've made lots of different level of backups
I'll be good on that. I've been burned badly in the past with backups so I run probably
an obsessive number types of backups


on my win7 machine I have 7 accounts for different things
each account the "USER" folder is saved on a combination of CD / DVD and USB keys
I have a drive, where all my DJ stuff / video is kept
another drive where all my USER accounts are stored
and yet another one with a backup and image.

LOL

[jaye944]

the only thing is I bought the machine with win7 home
I did a hack to upgrade it to home premium, so I think that key is now different
I don't think this is going to be a major problem,
as if anything goes wrong, I'll just pop back the old HDD back in,
WHICH,,, is actually a better backup than my "backups"

oh LORDY !

[R3dliner]

Does your laptop support any M.2 slot? If so I would look at the nvme ssd's.
Night & day performance.

[jaye944]

I bought the machine in 2011 (I think) so I shoulndt have thought so

[amgraham]

To R3dliner's point yeah... it would be faster but my daughter has a Satellite of similar vintage, higher specs even... and it doesn't have an M.2 slot. Even if it did, those early M.2 slot were often just used for Wifi/4G cards and didn't support SATA drives and if they did, only at regular, not NVME PCIe speeds. But... it would have been a slot to use, if not already occupied by a Wifi card, which was typical at the time.

[dzvero]

Swapping disk even when copying low level might be a problem with Win -it will complain about hardware change and usually these are tight to hardware to be made for the laptop

[amgraham]

I've swapped literally dozens of SSDs for conventional disks for myself, friends and family. Never had a problem. Once it was licensed, MS was OK with it......and I'm pretty "honest" about licensing since I'm involved in managing our KMS server at work with 30,000 Windows servers... and another 40,000 Linux/Unix/Solaris boxes but... I don't have so much of a hand in the RedHat licensing. If you swap out a number of components or... as I've seen guys on CL advertising a hard disk with Win 10 installed... you might have a problem but... I've never had an issue swapping a typical "hard disk" for an SSD and MS complaining.

Adding info... I did have problem activating Win 10 on the gaming/VR rig my son and I built for Christmas. It was a "scratch" build, we bought the case, motherboard, cpu, gpu, nvme pcie ssd (for OS and core apps), regular ssd (for games), and conventional disk for recordings, ram, etc. I bought a "legit" copy of Win 10 but it wouldn't activate. It was a sealed, legit copy. Called MS, gave them the info... no problem, they turned it up.

[jaye944]

Hey guy's,
Sorry for the delay, I've been off work with a bad back.

So I eventually went for a WD SSD, there blue version with 3D nano, 500 Gb

In the end I did a clean install to an "out of box" build. I'm keeping my existing HD, as a backup. Going to copy over my software.

Man, the best bang for buck, $200 (inc tax) took my read/write from 70mb's to 200+mbs

The drive says 530mbs but I'm guessing my interface is holding it back, my existing HD is like 300gb, and the SDD is 600, so half as slow (if I have the terminology right)

Anyway, did a YT vid, txs again for the help

MY machine goes like the clappers now, when I swapped back to the old drive to do some checks, it was like watching paint dry !