Be Excellent To Each Other

I want to get an SSD that I can put in a laptop, and put windows 8 on it. The reason for an SSD I know they are more robust as it will be swapped out regularly.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/comp ... 3-60g.html


Any good?

Technically yes, but 60GB is small if you intend to actually do anything with it - is it just going to be a testbed?

If not, you probably need a second "normal" drive to put programs on, etc.

Was thinking as a replacement of my works laptop HDD so I can use it for personal use.

It's a bit small.
How much data do you have on there at the moment?

None.

It will be a virgin drive. Could I be better with a standard or a hybrid then?

You'd be better off with a 128GB, but it does depend on what you plan to put on it. Windows 7, Office and the Adobe Suite will eat most of that drive on their own, before you even start to think about games.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/comp ... 620as.html

what are hybrids like?

The 60GB Corsair Nova Series 2 SSD I got would've been fine, but I have all media on the network and it's s-h-i-t SHIT. Don't get a Corsair. It's apparently only the specific model that's an utter turd but there's been complete silence from them over it, beyond "we meet our advertised speeds in one specific, unrealistic benchmark, you can RMA it for one that might work but is likely just as bad if you like" - that writes the company off for anything else ever for me.

Seriously, apart from booting Windows quicker it's orders of magnitude slower than the old-fashioned drive the laptop came with. I'm going to use it to bring a copy of my music library to work.

These SSD are confusing me.


OCZ do a Petrol range which are cheaper but slower than the agility that I posted. Twice as big for £30 more.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/comp ... -128g.html

What should I be looking for?

I'm not sure but check your OS supports it and as everyone says you have enough room to actually use it after installing all your normal shizzle.

Crucial M4 is the SSD of choice at the moment, especially since Crucial released a new firmware a few months ago that really pepped up performance (any M4 you buy now will be on the new firmware).

64GB is too small, don't get a 64GB SSD, even if you're adamant that you'll be putting 'nothing' on it.

128GB M4s are very reasonably priced at the moment -

http://www.ebuyer.com/266526-crucial-12 ... t128m4ssd2

Watch out for cheap SSDs that are using shit controllers and/or are end of line stock thus on old controllers or firmware that can't be upgraded or don't support TRIM or use cheapass slow NAND chips.

When it comes to SSDs you get what you pay for, so don't go bargain basement.

Obviously depending on what youre using it for, I think 64gb would be ok. I have a 40gb one but that is too small. I basically only have windows 7 and office on it and its always running out of space. 64gb for me would be perfect.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/comp ... -120g.html

Wend for this one, as it was £42 for 60gb more..

Takes about 5 seconds to boot. Just wow

There aren't really any 'bad' SSDs out there now, the dodgy ones that were still knocking around in the supply chain 12-18 months ago have all been shifted, certainly from all of the main sellers.

I'd just open up your Macbook to check it's got the standard SATA data and power connectors in there, (if it uses a standard 2.5 inch hard drive it should have), and if so, any SSD should simply slot in and then rebuild your OS. (Someone more Mac orientated could perhaps confirm that.)

Ebuyer and Amazon have 64GB SSDs down at the £55-£60 mark, but around £75 will get you a decent 128GB drive, although personally I'd prefer to push out to £87.50 for a Crucial M4 - http://www.ebuyer.com/266526-crucial-12 ... t128m4ssd2

I believe the Crucial M500 is the newer model of the M4, and 128GB drives seem to be around the same price, so that would be a good option too.

Whatever you buy it's always worth checking for newer firmware, as they really are little self-contained computers rather than a 'dumb' storage device.

I recently rebuilt a Sony Vaio with Windows 7 Ultimate on an SSD after the hard drive went pop, and it's now ridiculously quick - for ANY machine be it PC or laptop or Mac or anything else, replacing a mechanical hard drive with an SSD is the single most impressive upgrade you can make in terms of the ZOMG WOW factor.

Get one of the hybrid Seagate drives. It's a standard hard drive with an SSD that it uses as a cache.

My SanDisk extremes are still awesome.

If you have lion or mountain lion, you'll have a recovery partition you can reinstall from.

Hold down option on restart

Edit; new hard drive though.