Should I upgrade from 8Gb to 16Gb RAM?

[sorex]

I installed Win10 on a spare desktop a few weeks ago.

Is it already possible to image the HD and restore it onto an SSD?
That wasn't possible a few years ago.

Does your BIOS need to support SSD or is the onboard controller acting as a normal HD for older BIOSs?

 

[RandomCoder]

The BIOS will see it as a standard SATA drive like any other conventional HDD. No special BIOS required!
There are new SSD formats, M.2 and U.2 which allow even faster speeds and these slot into the motherboard much like a memory card does, but these do require a newer motherboard with the new slot present. These cards are a similar price to the standard 2.5" SSD's but they are not limited to 6GB's which is the SATA standard.

 

[sorex]

hmm, it seems that SSD's have become quite cheap to what they were a few years ago.

you can get 250Gig for less than 100 euros these days (http://eu.crucial.com/eur/en/ct250bx100ssd1)

it used to be a couple of hundreds for a few gigabytes.

 

[wonder]

Stupid question here:

Wouldn't it be the same if I just had the OS installed on a memory card? It's way more affordable!!

EDIT: Okay, I've googled it. It was indeed a stupid question.

 

[RandomCoder]

Are you intending to never turn your PC off

 

[DonManfred]

I had thought that with all of Windows disk caching and such that an SSD would not make a huge difference – but this does not seem to be the case.

You will change your mind if you see your pc booting into windows in much less than a minute

 

[sorex]

update of my personal situation...

I bought that 250Gig ssd I refered to (only €75 because VAT was dropped) and dumped the existing Win10 install to it.

Now it need 5 seconds to boot windows to the login screen & 1-2 seconds from login to full loaded desktop

(and that's just a Pentium Core2Duo 2.4GHz of 6 years old or so (Acer Veriton M460 or something) with 2Gb RAM (will buy another 2 as it will be my main machine))

 

[canalrun]

Hello,
What about after boot?
Imagine a very large SSD, say 1 TB, that is used as the main and only hard drive. Windows and everything else is installed on this drive.

I know boot time on my Windows machine probably approaches five minutes. A large problem is a few programs that insist on displaying their splash screens for a minute or so as they initialize.

After Windows is up and running and after a particular program has been loaded the first time, say the Chrome browser, all the following times the program is open are very fast. I would assume this is because each program is loaded from all sorts of Windows disk caches in memory. Assume 8 or 16 GBs of memory.

Does the SSD make a huge difference at this point?

Thanks,
Barry.

 

[MikeH]

Does the SSD make a huge difference at this point?

Yes, wherever file i/o is concerned, SSD makes a huge difference.

 

[sorex]

@canalrun : most brands mention that it (SSD) is (theoretically) 15 times faster than a normal SATA drive.

also... IE opens a lot faster because a lot of what it uses is already prefetched by the system and other programs/services.
that's why Chrome/Firefox need more time the first time.

and as SSD is so fast it's no use to leave prefetch and superfetch on so you gain on the memory side aswell.

 

[aidymp]

One thing with the SSD ALWAYS! ALWAYS! ALWAYS! Have a backup of your work! I lost everything when my 3 week old SSD just died! now I have backups of backups!!

BUT yes it it MUCH faster, infact I would never use a Real drive for my O/S again!

 

[sorex]

same goed for any other "carrier" , I saw sata drives die after 3 days aswell.

as most of the time with electronic stuff... the old stuff was better than the poor quality we get these days.