SSDs the experience

I am putting in SSDs just before July 4.

Here's my situation. I have a fast and quiet laptop with two quiet, normal hard drives. Everything has been running great with Sonar and all of the various plug-ins. The music sounds great!

But over the past year plus I've been adding more programs and Kontakt libraries etc. Although I have defragged my disks several times, the boot up process has been getting slower and slower. I have gotten to about 70 percent full on my main drive with the OS and all of the programs, and the second drive that contains my Sonar project files is getting near 50 percent full. In any case, everything is definitely slower now than when I first got the laptop, even though it's still fast while working with the files after everything has booted sufficiently.

So I'm taking the plunge and putting in two 1TB SSDs this week.

I'll note here in a follow up post if this was a tragic choice or it has worked out as I hoped.

I'm backing everything up with Acronis, so I believe after I've put in the SSDs I'll just need to restore from Acronis and everything will be just like I had it, only faster. I've used Acronis often enough to restore entire drives that I'm confident that will work out.

I'm going out on a limb by using up all of my music funds for this, but I'm gambling this will work out so that I'm stoked.

I went with two of the 1TBs you have above.

I haven't noticed much improvement by running SONAR projects from SSD, but it's an undeniable blessing for OS/Apps drive. For now I'm using a 250 Gb Samsung 840 EVO disk for the OS and a 3Tb Toshiba HDD for projects/samples/documents/storage. Pretty happy!

The Samsungs come with a cloning utility which is quick and painless.
 
Already got an 840 Evo and an 840 Pro in my stage laptop and just put an 840 Evo in my DAW.
 
They're as fast as a fast thing!

Ok my story.

I got two 840 EVO's One for home PC, one for music PC. I did read the instructions. And I cloned my sys drive to the SSD per Samsung instructions. But it wouldn't boot. Repeated steps several times to make sure I was doing this right. Still wouldn't boot.

So I created an disk image with Acronis. Then I did a clean install of Win8. Tried to install Acronis on new OS and it wouldn't install.

Went to Acronis for support. Chose live chat support. That was a big disappointment. To solve my Acronis issue, their support gave me a link to a third party site that they told me to let it install a utility that would fix my problem, and they suggested that I let the program run a scan on my registry, and they also said that the first 15 fixes were free!!

I was stunned. Since I have used Acronis for so long, and trusted them, I let the utility install before I was told about the registry scan and free fixes. Acronis went down quite a few notches in my book.

As if it wasn't bad enough, it got worse. I got the Win8 update for $40 way back before release. And I did a clean install of the OS,and wiped everything from my sys drive to do the clean install. Now WIN8 Update won't activate because there was no previous Windows installed.

So, I used a Acronis boot disk to access my backed up image. The restore was successful. But it wouldn't boot into it. Dead in the water.

So I had to go buy another copy of Win8. And I have been working in this issue since the end of May!

My first SSD experience was not good. I just got the os going the day before I had to leave to go out of town for two weeks on business! So I haven't really had time to test.

As to why it happened, I can only guess that it has something to do with Win8 boot manager.

[edit] I didn't even try to put the other SSD in my music computer. I have to learn what I did wrong on my home box before I even attempt to install it on my music PC. [/edit]

Thanks for the reply lawa. I know that was scattered all over. But that was the short version. I'm no idiot to working on a PC, but this had me stumped. I really thought I had all the bases covered. But when I would think I had one problem solved, another crept up to add to the situation!! Then it just kept mounting....

To answer your suggestions:

1. No. It was wiped out with Disk Director to overcome a problem. I figured a clean install would solve everything.

2. I do have the back up image
of that drive on another HD. And I have a bootable Acronis disk. And the restore was successful. But my pc won't boot up with that drive. It has something to do with the boot manager for Win8 that I haven't figured out yet.

3. See my post above. It just won't boot even though it says restore was successful.

I was able to install Win8. Just couldn't get it activated because of no previous Windows installation. And the only previous Win installation is that backed up image that Acronis will restore successfully but the computer still won't boot into that restored image!!

See the circle?

I hate you lot...    I've had to buy an 840 EVO now!!
 
 
 
 
 
 
(I got the 1Tb one...)

lawajava
Karyn -- I bought two 1TBs because I work with two hard drives in my laptop. Regardless, after getting it in and getting everything back in place, the experience is incredibly satisfying. Oh my gosh, it's great.

Oh great!!   Now I have to go get another...
 
Why do y'all do this to me?