On Sun, 16 Oct 2016 09:57:50 +0100, Bod wrote:

On 16/10/2016 09:40, T i m wrote:
On Sun, 16 Oct 2016 02:24:49 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

On 15/10/2016 11:38, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
David Paste wrote:
(It'll be replacing a 5200 rpm drive in a new-to-me laptop running
Ubuntu for the shed, currently is is a bit creaky, am I barking up the
wrong tree to assume an SSD will improve the snappiness of the user
interface?)

Dunno. Bought a new laptop and changed to an SSD. Which totally
transformed the start up time.

Decided to do the same with an older smaller and more basic one I use for
car stuff, and it made little or no difference.

Sometimes its like fixing a congestion point on a road - that traffic
jam just moves to the next slowest junction. Old machines may be disk
limited, but you may find the CPU is not far behind - so you clear the
first problem, and then find that its still slow but now for a different
reason (i.e. not have the CPU grunt).

+1

I've probably done 10 SSD 'upgrades' now and the improvement in
general performance ranges from 'remarkable to 'not sure it was worth
it' (especially if you also consider the wasted time, cost and
capacity loss).

Cheers, T i m


The best idea is to just use a small 60 or 120GB SSD only for your
*system* drive.

Whilst that may be the best in a desktop it's not usually an option
for most laptops (and what I generally fit SSDs into).[1] The only
desktop here that has a SSD is the quad core Atom based machine I've
just built and used an SSD because I wanted to get the best out of it
and store most of my data on my server.

That size is now very affordable.

Whilst it's a lot better than it was, that only really applies to
drives that are still smaller than you typically get with conventional
drives.

Cheers, T i m

[1] Until SSD's are available at the same cost of conventional drives
for the same capacities, I mainly see their suitability to laptops (if
you are actually using your laptop portably, for both speed and
durability), tinkerers (people who want to try new stuff) or people
with plenty of money to spend on something that is probably idle for
99.9% of their day and wouldn't therefore make much difference ITRW.