I took the opportunity that the brief down time I mentioned earlier has afforded me to do something I’ve been putting off. I cloned the hard drive on my primary workstation to a good-sized solid state drive and removed the old hard drive. I was down to about 10% free space available and it was pretty much a necessity. Windows starts getting cranky at under 15% available space.
The process was a terrible pain in the rear end involving a lot of crawling around on the floor and grumbling, being nagged by impatient dogs, and answering telephone calls and texts that are coming in a neverending stream but it’s done and appears to be working. The system now boots in about a third of the time.
I wouldn’t have installed a SSD as my primary drive a few years ago but the technology has come a long way since then I thought I’d give it a try. I’m also thinking about investigating the cost of mirroring my whole danged drive up in the cloud. That would provide a certain amount of reassurance just in case. I’ve already got automated cloud backup (which I’ve rarely had occasion to go back to) but I know from experience that reinstalling and reconfiguring all of my software can take an enormous amount of time. And expense.
Update
That really perked up Dragon Age: Inquisition. That wasn’t my primary objective but it’s nice.
I have my OS on an 255GB SSD. I had my Steam folder on its own SSD, but I swapped it to a 1TB Western Digital Black drive because I needed more space. I use a SSD for my virtual machines, and the performance there is phenomenal. The VM files are several GB’s, and they load in a flash.
I have another 1TB WD Black drive for data and a 2TB Green drive for long term storage. I have 2 4TB WD Green drives I am going to use in Raid 1 for Windows Backup with versioning, and I have several external drives for additional backup software. (I got paranoid a while back.)
With the exception of extremely large files, I have been unimpressed with SSD’s. All of my HDD’s have 64MB of cache, and they are fast. (The Greens need to wake up, but the Blacks are always ready.) I suspect the algorithm is pulling the data asynchronously and reassembling it in the cache, but when it comes to files larger than 64MB, they cannot keep up.