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Are SSD any good?
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AfterDawn Addict
1 product review
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13. November 2010 @ 04:55 |
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2.5 drives and 3.5 drives might seem very similar, but they are not. I avoid WD 3.5" drives like the plague due to my experiences with repeated DOA units (as well as the RAID issues that also effect non-RAID performance by causing 2-3 second system stalls). Yet, they are my favorite 2.5" drive...the only reason I use Hitachi in low stress situations is the lower cost.
Seagate? I know there have been firmware issues, but at least they fix their firmware issues. WD calls their firmware issues features and refuses to do anything about them. The 5200RPM seagates are a bit too noisy, but the 7200RPM drives make the same noise as a 7200RPM WD (actually, they make a lot less noise because the WD drives make loud clicking noises every time that they decide to go to sleep in the middle of a sustained write).
WD makes great laptop drives because they just focus on making a good drive. They are not trying to come up with new features that no one wants on these drives...they just make them fast, quiet, and reliable. If they applied these principals to making a 3.5" drive, they would be king in that field...too bad they spend all their time trying to make their drives turn off for no reason.
Hitachi? That might as well be two companies. They make cheap, basic, noisy, featureless drives in 3.5", their 2.5" drives are essentially the same, but built a little better to deal with the g-forces that laptops are exposed to even under careful care. They are also quieter, but that goes without saying. Then you have the other Hitachi...the company making 15K server drives that last for 8 years, only to be replaced when the whole server gets replaced. Yes, these are very loud and they run very hot...but what do you expect from a 15K 3.5" drive?
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Senior Member
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16. November 2010 @ 18:01 |
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Killerbug hates everything and is the most pessimistic user on the site.
I have had nothing but issues with seagate drives.
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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16. November 2010 @ 21:22 |
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WD drives don't go into sleep during a sustained write?
The fact that on the bugged drives (and none of mine except the WD15EADS and the oldest 1TB drives do this) the load cycle count does not increase when a sustained write occurs suggests this is not the case.
Who knows, I may eat my words later on this, but of all the HDDs I ordered, including nearly 20 WDs, only one has ever been DOA, which was a Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB, supposedly one of the 'reliable' drives they made. One wonders what the unreliable ones were like for DOAs. The 7200.9 and 7200.10 I had were the noisiest drives I have owned, or even heard in any PC system. So loud in fact, that when seeking they made the aluminium hard disk cage in my old case rattle. Not even the 37GB Raptors could pull that off.
Caviar Blacks are not quiet drives, but they're well ahead of Seagates. WD Greens are effectively silent. You'd never know there are 8 of them in my server. You wouldn't even know there was one.
15K drives are a totally different product class. All companies concerned (though not sure about Samsung) make these, and universally they're earachingly loud, but incredbly fast and incredibly reliable, and incredibly expensive.
When it comes to desktop drives, i.e. relevant, Hitachi are cheap, noisy and slightly suspect, Samsung are relatively quiet (but horrible for vibration), relatively inexpensive but very suspect, WD are mostly very quiet, moderately expensive and long-term relatively reliable, just a higher percentage of DOAs versus other brands, and Seagates are noisy, hot, often expensive and relatively suspect.
You could say 'better the devil you know' is the reason why I go WD, but tbh, it would take multiple failures for me to stop recommending them, given the success rate they've achieved thus far.
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Senior Member
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16. November 2010 @ 23:34 |
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I'll give yer post a +1 SAM since there isn't a like button on AD.
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Jeffrey_P
Senior Member
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17. November 2010 @ 00:41 |
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Originally posted by KillerBug:
2.5 drives and 3.5 drives might seem very similar, but they are not. I avoid WD 3.5" drives like the plague due to my experiences with repeated DOA units (as well as the RAID issues that also effect non-RAID performance by causing 2-3 second system stalls). Yet, they are my favorite 2.5" drive...the only reason I use Hitachi in low stress situations is the lower cost.
Seagate? I know there have been firmware issues, but at least they fix their firmware issues. WD calls their firmware issues features and refuses to do anything about them. The 5200RPM seagates are a bit too noisy, but the 7200RPM drives make the same noise as a 7200RPM WD (actually, they make a lot less noise because the WD drives make loud clicking noises every time that they decide to go to sleep in the middle of a sustained write).
WD makes great laptop drives because they just focus on making a good drive. They are not trying to come up with new features that no one wants on these drives...they just make them fast, quiet, and reliable. If they applied these principals to making a 3.5" drive, they would be king in that field...too bad they spend all their time trying to make their drives turn off for no reason.
Hitachi? That might as well be two companies. They make cheap, basic, noisy, featureless drives in 3.5", their 2.5" drives are essentially the same, but built a little better to deal with the g-forces that laptops are exposed to even under careful care. They are also quieter, but that goes without saying. Then you have the other Hitachi...the company making 15K server drives that last for 8 years, only to be replaced when the whole server gets replaced. Yes, these are very loud and they run very hot...but what do you expect from a 15K 3.5" drive?
I have four WD 74 gig Raptors that are almost five years old and who knows how many on-off cycles. They were configured for RAID 0. Now I use one WD2001FASS-00U0B0 2.0T Velociraptor (Black) that is ~ 1 year old + the old 74 gigers..
Through the years Seagate drives have given me more grief. Even though I do daily back-ups, just the thought of important data being trashed, I refuse to buy crap like that.
The Seagate ST3150054 1.5T has one of the worst HD track records of all time.
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AfterDawn Addict
1 product review
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17. November 2010 @ 06:19 |
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To each his own...I know what the drives I get do. I know that the WD "green" drives are the loudest drives I have ever used (including 15K) thanks to their loud clicking. Perhaps sam is correct, and it is just that WD have terribly high DOA rates...I guess probability says that someone (me in this case) will get nothing but bad drives.
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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17. November 2010 @ 12:44 |
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I know what the load cycling noise sounds like, as I ran all of the newer drives I bought externally when first copying data to them. It is still well below the seek noise of almost any other drive I have owned.
I'm uploading a file of recordings I have just made of most of the drives I have free access to (as in, they aren't in a PC that's currently running).
Of these, the WD5000AAKS tested is empty so it doesn't seek, the test still serves for idle noise, but for seek rest assured it's almost identical to the WD2500AAJS tested.
The 7200.10 is the only Seagate I can currently get hold of but it's not the only Seagate I've owned. The 7200.9 250GB is actually louder by quite a considerable margin, if you can believe that.
The WD10EACS tested is second-gen, meaning it's 'Caviar Green' designation and not 'WD GreenPower', and also means it has the quieter spinup routine. The fourth generation WD20EARS drives are all busy in my server at the moment, but generally I would place them as being slightly quieter still than the WD15EADS included here.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=K7JXAK6I
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Senior Member
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17. November 2010 @ 18:10 |
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Originally posted by sammorris:
I know what the load cycling noise sounds like, as I ran all of the newer drives I bought externally when first copying data to them. It is still well below the seek noise of almost any other drive I have owned.
I'm uploading a file of recordings I have just made of most of the drives I have free access to (as in, they aren't in a PC that's currently running).
Of these, the WD5000AAKS tested is empty so it doesn't seek, the test still serves for idle noise, but for seek rest assured it's almost identical to the WD2500AAJS tested.
The 7200.10 is the only Seagate I can currently get hold of but it's not the only Seagate I've owned. The 7200.9 250GB is actually louder by quite a considerable margin, if you can believe that.
The WD10EACS tested is second-gen, meaning it's 'Caviar Green' designation and not 'WD GreenPower', and also means it has the quieter spinup routine. The fourth generation WD20EARS drives are all busy in my server at the moment, but generally I would place them as being slightly quieter still than the WD15EADS included here.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=K7JXAK6I
That's about on par with what I have noticed with my own personal set ups. I own 1 seagate and couldn't stand its noisiness so I moved it into the PS3 which masks it. My caviar green is fine as well as my F3 although the F3 is a bit noisier on spin up. My WD20EARS is probably the quietest and my old IDE hitachi is still running after 6 years and is the loudest thing ever. Although that's not a very fair comparison.
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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17. November 2010 @ 20:29 |
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To be fair, the 7200.10 in my NZXT Whisper was almost inaudible. Fact is though, it was audible. None of the other storage drives in the system (the HD753LJ, various other WD greens) were.
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AfterDawn Addict
1 product review
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18. November 2010 @ 05:59 |
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Where is the recording of the 1.5TB seagates you hate so much? All you uploaded was a recording of their first-gen 750GB...a drive that was faster than a 10K WD when it launched, and which had more space than any WD as well. It was a noisy drive, that is what you got when you bought the largest, fastest desktop drive ever produced at the time. To be fair, the noise was not a symptom of a problem; I purchased two of these over 3 years ago, and they have been running 24-7 without issue ever since...loud but reliable and fast. The 250GB does not really factor into any modern drive discussion; every tech company has changed products a lot in the 6-7 years since the first gen 250GB seagates were discontinued. You might as well upload recordings of the old "Big Foot" drives.
As for your WD10EACS and WD15EADS recordings, neither of them have the clicks I was talking about. These are not the close-together dull clicks that all drives make to some extent...they are the LOUD, single clicks that sound like a whip being cracked...where the drive turns off for 2-5 seconds after it happens. Every 1.5TB WD I have tried has had these clicks, followed by the offline time that either results in a system stall, a BSOD, or an emergency rebuild by the RAID adapter (if they are in RAID). It isn't a constant thing, and it does not happen at idle. It only happens during sustained writes and RAID recovery, and only after 5-20 minutes of sustained writes. Even if I give them the benefit of the doubt and say that it was just a bunch of DOA units I got back-to-back-to-back, that does not change anything. Even if the third drive had worked perfectly, it would have cost me over $140 after all the cross-shipping for a drive that is slower than a $90 seagate. If I decided I wanted WD hard drives, I would have to order at least 8 of them to have any hope of getting two that worked well enough to use in RAID1...and I would have to use them in RAID1 because I cannot use them with a hardware RAID controller for RAID5 because WD blocks the use of RAID, and I cannot trust them running without redundancy given the high "DOA" rates that (for some reason) include all failures within the first week...it is not a DOA if it happens after you move all your documents to the new drive!
...If I am going to spend that kind of money, I will just order 4 more 1.5TB seagates and a new RAID card for the same money as those 8 WD drives...I would have 3x more redundant space (not including the extra 1.5TB I would get from combining two RAID5 arrays), plus I would have a spare hardware RAID card for ebay.
BTW...I have yet to have any of the seagate drives in my RAID arrays fail. I know you were sure that I would loose a pair of these drives in the same day, but so far the closest I have gotten was when I was cleaning and I accidentally pulled a power line off of one of the drives. They all still have almost perfect SMART. They all still run within 2C of eachother, and they are all still as quiet as WD Black drives (but without the loud clicks found on the 1.5TB version of the black).
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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18. November 2010 @ 14:00 |
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The 1.5TB Seagate is in my housemate's PC. I didn't buy one as the experience of the 7200.9 and 7200.10 was more than enough to put me off. Suffice to say though, it's plenty audible.
Also, the 7200.10 being as fast as a Raptor is absolutely comical. They couldn't even match the sustained speeds of a 74GB Raptor, let alone the 150 that was out by then, or the access times.
In the old days, noise indeed wasn't indicative of issues, as earlier Seagate drives were pretty reliable, just epic loud.
Actually the load cycle clicks are present in the WD Green recordings, it happens at spinup on most of the drives. It's really nothing to write home about, quieter than even their normal seek noise.
The fact that the load cycles result in system pausing is even more bizarre, as the load cycling is a near-instantaneous process.
I will point out that not only have I used eighteen WD green drives, not one of which either makes this supposedly loud clicking noise, or causes any system pauses whatsoever, I have used one as an OS drive as well, and didn't notice any pausing there either. Granted it was slow, as you'd expect from a 5400rpm drive as the access times will be terrible, but it worked fine, without any of the problems you go on and on about.
Maybe they don't work with your RAID card properly, but considering I know multiple people who use WD Green drives in RAID without any issues, I'm starting to doubt that too.
All of this comes off very much like Seagate fanboyism.
I will just point out, 'as quiet as WD Black drives' is not a compliment. The WD Blacks are among the loudest drives WD have made save raptors. That's allowable given the fact they're ludicrously fast, but trying to claim Seagates are quiet because they aren't noisier than Caviar Blacks is like saying a computer is powerful because it can boot windows 95.
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AfterDawn Addict
1 product review
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20. November 2010 @ 06:12 |
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"I will just point out, 'as quiet as WD Black drives' is not a compliment. The WD Blacks are among the loudest drives WD have made save raptors"
I know that...but when you compare the noise of a 7200RPM seagate to the noise of a 5400RPM WD; and then call the seagate "too loud"; I have to at least note that the noise made by a 7200RPM seagate is similar to the noise from a 7200RPM WD (assuming that the loud clicks I spoke of are not there). I might also note that I have never recommended the slower seagate drives, they are not much quieter than the 7200RPM models, they are far less reliable, far slower, and they are only $5-$10 cheaper. If I need a quiet 3.5" drive, it will be a WD green, but it will be 1TB or smaller because the larger models are junk.
You call me a fanboy...this isn't exactly fair. WD is my favorite brand of 2.5" drive because they have always served me well (at least for the past few years). I have given WD far more chances than I would have given to any other company, and their 1.5TB and larger drives have always failed me. I would love for WD to make a 3.5" 1.5TB+ drive to the quality standards of their 2.5" drives...seagate needs some competition in this field. I am a fan of technology that is reliable and long lasting...this makes me a fan of the Seagate 1.5TB drives that work so well for me. They are not quiet, they run hot, and they are not speed champions, but they are reliable...and that is all I care about in a storage drive.
The Raptor X of the time was a seek champion...but sustained reads & writes (and by sustained, I mean anything over 512K) were actually slower than the 750GB 7200RPM seagate.
As for the load cycle clicks, these are not what I am taking about...I thought I made the problem clear as crystal, but for some reason we keep going back to the load cycle issue...the problem I encountered the two drives that were not simply DOA was that under extended sustained writes, the drive would make a loud click that sounded like a whip cracking (you could hear it from 3 rooms away), followed by the drive turning off (even the LED at the bottom). The LED would turn back on after about 1/2 second, and then it was like the drive was just connected using a removable drive caddy. This is why I had so much trouble with my RAID adapter, as this would always cause an emergency rebuild, which would cause sustained writes or reads, which would cause the problem all over again. When hooked up to normal ports, the problem mainly manifested itself during large file copies...usually just a message saying the destination no longer exists when doing a file copy, but if an app was working with the drive, then it might be a system stall or even a BSOD. It also happened every time I tried to do a full format of the drive, and it even happened from within WD's own diagnostic tools running from a DOS flash drive.
So...
WD 3.5" drives under 1TB: usually fine
WD 3.5" drives over 1TB: 100% of the drives I have tried had serious problems. Granted, I only tried three of them...you don't say how many 1.5TB WD drives you have tried, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that all 18 of the green drives you tried were 1.5TB or larger. Given that, we have tried 21 of them between us, with one that would not power up at all, and two that had huge problems. That is over 14% failure rate within the first day!
WD laptop drives: usually fine
Seagate 3.5" drives over 750GB: usually fine
Seagate 3.5" drives under 750GB: they were fine when I was buying them, but I have not bought one in a long time.
Seagate laptop drives: Better than WD 3.5" 1.5TB drives, but only by a hair. Total trash when you consider that WD 2.5" drives are usually within a few percent of the same price.
Seagate and WD 3.5" external drives: All Junk
WD 2.5" external drives: The best "pre assembled" USB drives I have found.
Seagate 2.5" external drives: even worse than the 2.5" seagate drives within.
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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20. November 2010 @ 07:14 |
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Quote:
I know that...but when you compare the noise of a 7200RPM seagate to the noise of a 5400RPM WD; and then call the seagate "too loud"; I have to at least note that the noise made by a 7200RPM seagate is similar to the noise from a 7200RPM WD (assuming that the loud clicks I spoke of are not there).
So you ignored the WD2500AAJS I posted then?
The 7200.11 1.5TB drives seem to be relatively durable long-term, but so are WD Green drives, of any size. The only issue with larger drives is the likelihood of them being DOA, something which 7200.11s suffer in almost equal measure, from what I've read. How many 7200.11s have you bought that have not been DOA, and how many WD Greens have you bought that were?
I can only say 1 of 2 7200.11s were DOA, as I've never bought any, but so far 0 out of 18 WD Green drives I've had have been DOA, including 4 2007 WD Greenpower 1TBs, 5 2008/2009 WD Caviar Green 1TBs (8/16/32MB), a WD15EADS and 8 new WD20EARS drives.
I can't say DOAs don't happen as that would be a lie, but your results hardly mirror other people's.
So you call the WD drives loud because they were faulty? Makes perfect sense that. Not many case fans are quiet if cut half their blades off..
What you're referring to here is affectionately known as the 'click of death' and it's a problem inherent with the fact that WD [along with other brands it seems] sells refurbished drives as new. Generally, when you get a drive that's been repaired, it doesn't tend to last very long, if at all. [This is why writing on the labels in permanent ink voids the warranty on drives, they can't be resold]
Not saying WD are a nice company that makes perfect products, they aren't, but a 0/9 failure rate with green drives 1.5TB or over gives me enough reason to take issue with your argument :P
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AfterDawn Addict
1 product review
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21. November 2010 @ 23:04 |
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OK...so instead of avoiding WD because they make bad drives, I will just avoid them because they always sell me broken refurbished drives. Thanks for clearing that up.
Maybe they could create a "WD Elite" model that is guaranteed not to be a refurb part...if they do that, then I'll give them a chance again...if the price isn't too insane.
[edit]
Something just occurred to me...could our radically different results be related to where we live? I mean, is WD selling off their refurb drives in the USA while Seagate is selling off their refurb drives in your country?
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 22. November 2010 @ 00:10
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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22. November 2010 @ 06:18 |
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It's a worldwide issue from what I read. Plenty of people have reported what you reported in the US, but fact of the matter is it hasn't happened to me yet in nearly two dozen drives.
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fadsarmy
Newbie
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26. November 2010 @ 20:06 |
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Originally posted by N0_0ne:
my hdd recently crashed and im conidering buying a 32gb ssd to use as my C drive. Im using windows 7 with a dual core amd and 2gb ram.
Has anyone used a ssd for there system drive and can tell me if this is a good idea , thanks?
If you are running windows 7 then an ssd will be THE BEST UPGRADE for your pc ever. It will fly. I recommend Intel X25-M or OCZ Vertex 2E. I have both and my pc is fast.
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fadsarmy
Newbie
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26. November 2010 @ 20:21 |
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Go buy one now. That's an order!
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 26. November 2010 @ 20:21
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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26. November 2010 @ 20:41 |
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Perhaps a bit bold, but yeah, getting an SSD has massively improved the performance of my system, and I only bought the relatively inexpensive X25-V.
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fadsarmy
Newbie
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26. November 2010 @ 20:46 |
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Originally posted by sammorris:
Perhaps a bit bold, but yeah, getting an SSD has massively improved the performance of my system, and I only bought the relatively inexpensive X25-V.
It's when you go back use a pc with a mechanical drive that you realize what a beauty an ssd is.
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