charles_reed
Well-Known Member
What's the point of non-essential back-up? If it's non-essential, delete it.[/QUOTE]
Such brilliance - at least my irony was not wasted on someone -;-)
New Lap top, suggestions
- Thread starter Gwylan
- Start date
Such brilliance - at least my irony was not wasted on someone -;-)
JumbleDuck
Well-Known Member
I have lots of non-essential stuff around. For example, two hundred ripped CDs and sixty ripped DVDs. If the drive they're on dies it will be a little inconvenient to do them again (so I have duplicate copies of the files on other devices) but there is some stuff, mainly work related, which would be catastrophic to use and which therefore live on four different machines in four different places.
JumbleDuck
Well-Known Member
With the exception of a couple of EeePCs, all my laptops (five, I think) are second-user IBM ThinkPads. Built like tanks, last for ages, superb technical documentation from Lenovo online, easy to repair and peanuts on eBay. OK, they might struggle a bit if I tried to run Windows on them, but I use Xubuntu linux for which 2.4GHz + 2GB is more than enough.
charles_reed
Well-Known Member
AN SSD is certainly considerably more expensive per GB than a traditional drive (a quick search of amazon suggesting ~ 4x in the 512GB bracket, less difference as you go down in capacity) but how many people actually *need* 1TB of storage in their laptop? 256MB seems to be well under £100. Or there's the hybrid option at ~£70 for 1TB. Although the OP mentioned not really using it on board, some people will argue that on a bouncy boat there is a reliability advantage in them in the short and medium terms over traditional drives.
Regarding lifespan, my first two laptops I retired after 7 years after upgrading the memory as far as I could and a couple of hard drive upgrades each. The limiting factor was that people were writing more bloated software for newer whizzier computers. At that point I couldn't *give* them away to charities (too old/low spec despite having been high-end toughbooks when purchased). I don't play games or have significant computing needs either, and changing to linux was not an option as that's actually what I always did the day I got the thing home. Changing to FreeBSD perhaps.
To the OP, although changing hard drives is often one of the simpler tasks with a laptop (where the "hard drive isn't soldered to the motherboard as with the new breed of Apples), manufacturers don't make it as easy as they used to. Sometimes popping the body open can be fiddly. Sometimes there are multiple little film ribbons to be removed. If the hard drive bay is not trivially accessible, try googling your laptop and "hard drive replacement" to see if there are helpful youtube videos etc. Lay out all the screws in a logical order and have a decent spudger handy
Fan maintenance also often easy and earns you many brownie points from friends whose MacBooks have been driving them nuts for months.
Edit: other complicating factors: drive height: Not always the same. Fortunately if the drive is screwed into a caddy this shouldn't be a problem if the newer drive is slimmer than the old one. Older drives tended to be 9.5mm. newer ones, especially SSDs, should be slimmer. Also note that older operating systems weren't so good at dealing with SSDs. Someone who knows more about windows can probably comment more but a quick search suggests TRIM only supported from Windows 7
1Tb SSB £336 1TB HDD £40. I rest my case.
If you look @ some of the trade comments on the cheap SSDs (128/256) Verbatims especially, you'll find their seek-rate is little different to that of a big (especially 7200 rpm) magnetic disks. Whilst my first PC had and extra-large 40Mb HDD. I don't think many would consider that adequate now. Many computers now have a hybrid drive, SSD for the OS and a magnetic disc for work-files.
As you say physically changing the HDD is simplicity itself - mirroring the boot sequence from the old HDD is far more challenging, as those who've done it will acknowledge. Of course, if you have the original OS CDs it's simple to start from scratch.
In any case I doubt, if it's making a noise, that it's the HDD - far more likely the cooling fan.
JumbleDuck
Well-Known Member
But as was pointed out, that difference only applies to very large HDs. For a more sensble 100GB there is stuff-all different between spinning and solid-state.