SSD Vs Hard Disk boot times

[DogNo1]

500 GB drives are the way to go. With all that's kept on the C:\ drive these days, including mirrored files from One Drive and Google Drive, it's good to have the space.

Neversure: You are always having hassles with your partitions. Why do you need four partitions? With the price of drives these days, you can have a single partition on each drive. In my lifetime, I've never bought a computer with more than two partitions on a drive. Those were the days when it was safer to have your system and data on different partitions. Today, it's cost effective to use one drive for your system and hidden partitions and a different drive for your data. With USB 3.0, external USB drives are very fast. With the new USB spec. on the horizon, they will be blazingly fast.

[Pib]

Heck, I will probably never a member of the multi-partition fan club as a home computer user. I've always just had "one" partition (excluding any Windows hidden partitions) for my operating system, apps, and data on my laptop drives. No need to worry about partition re-sizing/management then. Stopped using desktops about 20 years ago where the easy ability to have multiple drives would have probably caused me to be a partitions/multiple drive guy.

For my data files I create a folder called "mydata" on my C Drive/Partition and for every app that I use to create/save data files such as images, movies, audio, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, just anything I save in subfolders under the mydata folder. Basically I'm using "a folder with subfolders" as a separate partition but it's not a separate partition which can complicate things sometimes when you need to start re-sizing stuff.

Plus with multi-partitions on one drive if that drive fails physically/electronically you will most likely lose access to all partitions on the drive so having separate partitions on one drive really do't add much, if anything, in terms of data safety. Additionally, multiple partitions seem to just confuse a lot computer users.

But hey, I know a very good case can be made for multiple partitions like in a business which might push new images to all computers on a company LAN which would probably nuke all the data a personally created on personal folders like a "mydata" folder, but would not nuke them if they had been on a separate partition like D: drive/partition. But a home user is not in that situation as the home user is in control of what happens to his computer...even a Windows upgrade like from Win 7/8 to Win 10 don't mess with your personal data. Ah, yapping too much about the good and bad of partitions as partitions have both qualities....it's largely what a person has got use to over the years of computer use, how they use/play with the computer, etc.

[WhizBang]

I have a Transcend SSD in the laptop and Samsung EVO in the desktop. Both are good.

Personally I would not clone from my HD to SSD. I would rather do a clean install. This allows the opportunity to clean up the mess that windows becomes over time and offers a chance to rethink some of the software you have installed on your system. I like to 'try out' a lot of different software, so I do end up with a lot of uninstalled clutter. People who do not do a lot of installing and uninstalling may not have the same issues.

[impulse]

I like to 'try out' a lot of different software, so I do end up with a lot of uninstalled clutter. People who do not do a lot of installing and uninstalling may not have the same issues.

I have experienced the exact opposite on clean installs. I have a ton of handy little free utilities that I use (and count on) without even thinking about them. Some have been with me long enough I have no clue where I downloaded them, or which country I left the install disk in, or even which of the hundreds of confusingly similarly named "Video Converter" or "Registry Checker" or "CPU Temperature" utilities available on CNET, Downloads.com, etc. And, like you, I download bunches of them, try them out and bin 90% within a week or so. So many that I forget which ones were keepers, and which ones were junk.

So whenever I do a clean install, I lose a lot of utility that I'd taken for granted. Until (if?) I can ever find them again to download (and remember which ones were good). And that's on top of the dozens to hundreds of hours tweaking all my preferences for the programs I use every day- after the hours of installing the programs and getting the vendors to accept the registration because they seem to be naturally suspicious and rarely let me speak to a real person any more.

Once a month or so, I go through the Windows Control Panel program manager and uninstall a gob of programs to get rid of the detritus, then run CCleaner to clean up the remnants in the registry.

Edited December 7, 2015 by impulse

[Pib]

Here's a 2 min 30 sec youtube video on cloning a drive using Samsung Data Migration....first minute of video just shows the Samsung the Data Migration software download/install so you can really skip over that. Use whatever cloning software you prefer...this is just meant to serve as an example of how cloning occurs. With such an easy process and assuming a person's computer is already running fine, why use any other method.

I'm not implying cloning goes without any hitch 100% of the time depending on person's computer setup and sometimes sh&t just happens, but generally cloning (or just reloading a saved image to the new drive) gets person up and running in very little time with a perfect, mirror copy of this old drive. If the cloning don't go 100% problem free then you still have the original drive to keep/slide back into the computer until you figure out what went wrong, try another cloning app, etc.