Solid State Drives

[Steve2000]

I have a mechanical drive currently, it's nearing the end of it's useful life I reckon. It's actually a refurnished one that Seagate sent me about 4-5 years ago as the original one I bought had gone west. It seems to be getting that tad bit slower every week and I've finally had enough of this constant loading and want a performance increase.

Since the cost of mechanical drives is quite high still at the minute, I've been looking at solid state drives. Now I'm not well versed on these so I have a few questions.

Is it just a case of ghosting an image of my old mechanical drive (partitions as well) and loading that image onto a new solid state drive? Are the partitions the same etc? Silly questions I know but I've been out of this for a while.

Can they just be run like normal drives with everything loaded onto it? Or is it best to just have operating systems and programs on them and load other things like films and photos onto an external HDD?

Do they have a decent life on them? I read somewhere a couple of years ago now that the cells in them start dying out after 4 years or so? Is that true or just a load of toss?

Any help is appreciated.

TIA.

 

[Randomface74]

I wouldn't be ghosting anything to keep things simple. Maybe someone else can speak to this.

Because they're high cost / GB you'd usually have an HDD as well for data.

Their life is comparable to an HDD. They were worse when they first launched though, but new models are OK.

 

[.Griff.]

Can they just be run like normal drives with everything loaded onto it? Or is it best to just have operating systems and programs on them and load other things like films and photos onto an external HDD?

They can, and do, run just like normal drives and you could just treat it as a faster version of your old drive but there's little to no point wasting valuable space, after all SSD's are generally much smaller than mechanical drives, with media like films, and photos.

I'd stick to time critical items only for an SSD like your OS, games, often used apps such as Photoshop in my case. You can either keep your old drive or buy a relatively cheap mechanical drive to run alongside the SSD as a data drive.