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A teetotaling
beer aficionado
Picture of NavyGuy
posted
I was having some issues with my 6 year old Dell XPS8700 and I attributed to a failing HD. So, I replaced the C drive with a 500 GB SSD and since it was open and exposed, I added 16 GB of ram for a total of 24 gb as well as an additional 1T hard drive.

I can't believe the difference in performance. Boot time is down to about 15 seconds and it's very speedy. Well worth the cost and effort. $160 for the SSD, $90 for the 1T HD and about $120 for the RAM since I replaced all of the modals instead of mixing the brands.

I could have gone with a smaller SSD since all I have on there is the OP system and programs (about 225 GB) but the cost was not that much difference.

If you've got a desktop that seems to be slowing down, I highly recommend a SSD boot drive.



Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.

-D.H. Lawrence
 
Posts: 11524 | Location: Fort Worth, Texas | Registered: February 07, 2007Reply With QuoteReport This Post
No Compromise
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Tru' dat', Dawg.

H&K-Guy
 
Posts: 3720 | Registered: April 08, 2002Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
Picture of lkdr1989
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Excellent upgrade choice! On a side note...members - please backup your files/documents/pictures/videos on a regular basis. One is none, 2 is One, 3 is Two.




...let him who has no sword sell his robe and buy one. Luke 22:35-36 NAV

"Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves." Matthew 10:16 NASV
 
Posts: 4330 | Location: Valley, Oregon | Registered: June 03, 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Picture of erj_pilot
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Yup...Good advice NavyGuy!

I totally redid my "Media Server" with SSD's, loaded it with Win10, and bumped up the RAM to 24gb (limited to 16gb in my previous Win 7 Home Premium). I already had a plethora of 1TB drives in the HDD rack, so I configured those in a RAID to make 4TB of drive space for downloaded movies and shows. System runs GREAT!! Except for that little Xfinity/Adobe Flash issue I'm having with MS Edge...... Mad



"If you’re a leader, you lead the way. Not just on the easy ones; you take the tough ones too…” – MAJ Richard D. Winters (1918-2011), E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne

"Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil... Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw and as dry grass sinks down in the flames, so their roots will decay and their flowers blow away like dust; for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel." - Isaiah 5:20,24
 
Posts: 11054 | Location: NW Houston | Registered: April 04, 2012Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Ammoholic
Picture of Skins2881
posted Hide Post
I added Intel Optane drive to mine. Boots in 10 seconds, programs open twice as fast. It's a new type of memory that stores certain files used most often to speed loading. Problem with it is you need 7th gen Intel chip, 200 or higher chipset, and latest BIOS. Very few computers can use it. I love mine though.



Jesse

Sic Semper Tyrannis
 
Posts: 20758 | Location: Loudoun County, Virginia | Registered: December 27, 2014Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member!
posted Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by Skins2881:
I added Intel Optane drive to mine. Boots in 10 seconds, programs open twice as fast. It's a new type of memory that stores certain files used most often to speed loading. Problem with it is you need 7th gen Intel chip, 200 or higher chipset, and latest BIOS. Very few computers can use it. I love mine though.


Optane drive is only useful if you are still using a spinner HD as a primary drive. Adds zero value if you have a current SSD as your OS drive already. No different in idea from the hybrid spinner drives with a small data-caching SSD built into them.
 
Posts: 4340 | Location: Boise, ID USA | Registered: February 14, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Picture of bigdeal
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Did the same thing to my desktop just with a 256gb SSD. And if you have your backups configured correctly, you can restore that primary drive (or spinning backup drive) in a flash should you ever need to instead of jumping through the hoops of reinstalling Windows and all your application software.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: bigdeal,


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Guns are awesome because they shoot solid lead freedom. Every man should have several guns. And several dogs, because a man with a cat is a woman. Kurt Schlichter
 
Posts: 33845 | Location: Orlando, FL | Registered: April 30, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
eh-TEE-oh-clez
Picture of Aeteocles
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quote:
Originally posted by Xer0:

Optane drive is only useful if you are still using a spinner HD as a primary drive. Adds zero value if you have a current SSD as your OS drive already. No different in idea from the hybrid spinner drives with a small data-caching SSD built into them.


Partially true.

No noticeable improvement over a fast SSD like a new NVMe that uses multiple PCIe 3.0 lanes.

If you are using a traditional Sata 3 SSD drive, then you are pretty much only pushing 400-600 MB per second.

I'm at the point where I notice the SSD as a bottleneck moving large video and image files around, so I'll be going into a 4 lane NVMe next.
 
Posts: 13046 | Location: Orange County, California | Registered: May 19, 2002Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Ammoholic
Picture of Skins2881
posted Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by Xer0:
quote:
Originally posted by Skins2881:
I added Intel Optane drive to mine. Boots in 10 seconds, programs open twice as fast. It's a new type of memory that stores certain files used most often to speed loading. Problem with it is you need 7th gen Intel chip, 200 or higher chipset, and latest BIOS. Very few computers can use it. I love mine though.


Optane drive is only useful if you are still using a spinner HD as a primary drive. Adds zero value if you have a current SSD as your OS drive already. No different in idea from the hybrid spinner drives with a small data-caching SSD built into them.


You are correct, it's a poor man's SSD. It was $79, vs $250. For me who's computer usage is SIGforum, Excel, and Bill pay it does what I need which is speed up the slug that is Win10.

I got a steal on a computer from Dell Outlet that was for some reason missing it's SSD, but otherwise was top of the line. Worked out perfectly. Very few others would end up in a position that they'd have a computer with the specs mine does without SSD.



Jesse

Sic Semper Tyrannis
 
Posts: 20758 | Location: Loudoun County, Virginia | Registered: December 27, 2014Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member!
posted Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by Aeteocles:
quote:
Originally posted by Xer0:

Optane drive is only useful if you are still using a spinner HD as a primary drive. Adds zero value if you have a current SSD as your OS drive already. No different in idea from the hybrid spinner drives with a small data-caching SSD built into them.


Partially true.

No noticeable improvement over a fast SSD like a new NVMe that uses multiple PCIe 3.0 lanes.

If you are using a traditional Sata 3 SSD drive, then you are pretty much only pushing 400-600 MB per second.

I'm at the point where I notice the SSD as a bottleneck moving large video and image files around, so I'll be going into a 4 lane NVMe next.


Completely true.. The Intel M.2 Optane drives are intelligent "caching" drives. It's optimized for caching small file system OS random access, and "caches" commonly used data. It is also relatively small at 32GB-64GB. Hence when one is working with large video and image files, it's NOT going to cache them like it does system OS files and is not going to improve access or read times.

Unless you are confusing the small caching Optane drives with the Optane series of PCIe SSD's, which is a whole different beast that the common user is never going to have in their home PC.

FYI: SATA 3 spec and drivers are so well optimized that even with much less overall throughput capability, is much better at small file random file access latency (like OS files), than PCIe or NVME drives.
 
Posts: 4340 | Location: Boise, ID USA | Registered: February 14, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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