New Hard Drive Help

EndlessWaves

Samsung had the most recent notable issue with SSD design (the 840 Evo write speed issues) so I certainly wouldn't consider them to be particularly reliable.

If you want to buy on 'reliability' then it's more about support after the problem comes up. For those issues Samsung provided a workaround that was mostly effective (after a couple of attempts at it), but didn't offer to replace any of the affected drives.

ChuckMountain

The one thing to watch is the thickness of the drive.  The latest ones are even thinner which can cause a problem in older computers depending on how the drive is mounted.

Most SSD will come with a spacer which can be used but some HDD don't.  I swapped one on a Toshiba one recently and a newer smaller drive and until it has a spacer would wobble around.  There were no mechanical fixings other than the lid keeping it in place....

Boots0608

Thank you everyone for the replies.

The laptop is functioning at the moment so we are able to back everything up, there isn't alot on their anyway as the laptop is purely used for work purposes (so mainly used for Word, PowerPoint, PDFs etc..).  As i mentioned in my earlier post, 500GB would be plenty for what she needs, as we have an external hard drive where everything is stored/backed up on and we have a PC at home.

Due to the fact its just used for docs etc, im a bit reluctant to splash out anything really over £50 - which iv taken a look at the SSDs seem to be coming in well over that.

In regards to the back up of Windows, will it work if i create a backup on a SD Card in a USB Adapter?  I am looking to see if we can either upgrade to windows 10 or downgrade it to 7 as neither of us like Windows 8 at all.

Thank you again

Boots0608

Also can anyone sort of support my suspicion that since we have had this HP SMART error coming up, on task manager the disc space is hitting 100% usage despite hardly anything running (as i mentioned before i have stopped things like windows update, SuperFetch etc..).  They must be directly linked.

ChuckMountain

It depends on what you are using your machine for ?

It could be AV that is hammering it or the hardware issue.

How are you planning to backup Windows to SD ?  Normally you would need software and the capabilities of the software would determine the backup media.  It would normally have to be fairly big.

Boots0608

The laptop is literally used about 10 hours per week id say - minimal use.  On the laptop is just Office, any photos/videos etc are all saved on our PC/external hard drive.    So in regards to the re-install, i just need essentially to re-install windows 8 onto a new hard drive, i have no requirements to copy over any files because they are all held on an external HD already.  So a completely clean version of Windows is all im after, no requirement to bring anything across.

What is AV?

Um in regards to backing up, i was looking at - https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/15088/windows-create-installation-media which says "create your own installation media using either a USB flash drive or a DVD", minimum of 4GB so i have plenty of SD cards for cameras that have more than enough memory - just need to put it into one of the small USB adapters to plug into the USB port.

There is also a HP article (given its a HP laptop) but that says a recovery needs a minimum of 4 discs (and it lists DVDs) which implies at least 12 GB is needed (if a single layer DVD is about 4GB).  Which is a fair bit more than what the Microsoft website requires.  Its also a little fiddly if you want to go down the USB route as it says u need a USB stick no greater than 32GB and has to be NOT compatible with windows 8 (HP PCs - Creating a Recovery Image on Discs or Saving a Recovery Image to a USB Flash Drive (Windows 8) | HP® Customer Support )

Boots0608

Sorry its just clicked - on the laptop i am using Avast, which does pop up a fair bit on the Disc usage.  Surely though that alone cannot be slowing it down to a dire speed?  i will try and take a screenshot of the Disc usage on Task Manager.  Would you suggest a different AV to Avast?  My Kaspersky subscription is out soon on my laptop so i could increase the device number and use that.

Boots0608

Disc 100% usage.

Boots0608

That Disc usage only comes to about 3MB surely that cannot be 100%

EndlessWaves

It depends on the size of the requests. A hard drive can top out at less than 3MB/s that if the accesses are for very small bits of data (a few kilobytes). That's the big strength of SSDs, not the 500MB/s sequential transfers that often get mentioned in the advertising spiel which is a relatively small improvement in comparison.