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OS Hard Drive dying; Time for SSD?

saint2esaint2e Registered User regular
edited July 2012 in Help / Advice Forum
Hey all,

My desktop has been acting up quite a bit lately, and I'm pretty sure its due to the OS HD failing slowly.
This morning I woke up to a BSOD with KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR, and it was referencing ataport.sys.

In searching the interwebs for explanations for that BSOD message, all signs point to imminent hard drive failure. On the good side, this is only my OS/apps driver, so I feel like now would be a good plunge into the SSD market, as I have 2 other SATA hard drives for data, and an external RAID drive for my photos/videos/irreplaceable stuff.

Some questions:

1) Is my assumption that my HD is on it's last legs correct?
2) What should I be looking for in an SSD drive?

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saint2e on

Posts

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    Yeah that appears to be a disk issue.

    My rule of thumb has been checking on the ones with the best ratings and see what the negatives are telling me, for SSD. I'd shoot for 128gig at the lowest on your OS hard drive.

    You'll pretty much want everything on the SSD that you can feasibly fit in there.

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • saint2esaint2e Registered User regular
    bowen wrote: »
    Yeah that appears to be a disk issue.

    My rule of thumb has been checking on the ones with the best ratings and see what the negatives are telling me, for SSD. I'd shoot for 128gig at the lowest on your OS hard drive.

    You'll pretty much want everything on the SSD that you can feasibly fit in there.

    Indeed. I'm hoping I can squeeze on Win7, and if I'm lucky, Photoshop and Lightroom.

    Thanks for that.

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  • RendRend Registered User regular
    saint2e wrote: »
    bowen wrote: »
    Yeah that appears to be a disk issue.

    My rule of thumb has been checking on the ones with the best ratings and see what the negatives are telling me, for SSD. I'd shoot for 128gig at the lowest on your OS hard drive.

    You'll pretty much want everything on the SSD that you can feasibly fit in there.

    Indeed. I'm hoping I can squeeze on Win7, and if I'm lucky, Photoshop and Lightroom.

    Thanks for that.

    If you do gaming at all you're going to want a larger secondary drive. Even a 128gb SSD will fill up after one or two modern-day games, plus OS and utility apps like photoshop and such. Its really useful for the few you're playing right now, but if you're the type that keeps stuff installed for awhile, a high volume secondary drive will serve you well.

  • Nova_CNova_C I have the need The need for speedRegistered User regular
    Putting the games on a magnetic drive means they will still have the same load lag they always had. Which isn't a problem unless you decide it is.

    For me it was.

    I bought Crucial's M4 SSD, 256GB. Been using it two weeks now and man, it's awesome. It's not the fastest SSD out there, but it was sub $1 a GB, which was a requirement for me to buy an SSD. I run everything off of there except media, which is on my network drive, and project stuff, which is on a magnetic (Constant writes wear out an SSD faster).

    Yesterday I needed to reboot because iTunes is fucking stupid. I clicked 'Restart', went to get a glass of water, sat back down and my computer was fully done rebooting. So shut down + Post + boot up was maybe 15 or 20 seconds, max.

  • saint2esaint2e Registered User regular
    Yeah right now I have 3 Hard drives:

    1 - Sata 320GB drive (OS/apps installed)
    2 - Sata 500GB drive (old "Data" Drive)
    3 - SataII 2TB drive (current "Data" Drive)

    So while my games/apps are all comfortably on the current OS drive, I'll perhaps move some of them over to the "old Data Drive" and keep the current Data drive as is.

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  • RendRend Registered User regular
    Nova_C wrote: »
    Putting the games on a magnetic drive means they will still have the same load lag they always had. Which isn't a problem unless you decide it is.

    For me it was.

    I bought Crucial's M4 SSD, 256GB. Been using it two weeks now and man, it's awesome. It's not the fastest SSD out there, but it was sub $1 a GB, which was a requirement for me to buy an SSD. I run everything off of there except media, which is on my network drive, and project stuff, which is on a magnetic (Constant writes wear out an SSD faster).

    Yesterday I needed to reboot because iTunes is fucking stupid. I clicked 'Restart', went to get a glass of water, sat back down and my computer was fully done rebooting. So shut down + Post + boot up was maybe 15 or 20 seconds, max.

    I knew SSD was a miracle device when, after the PC started in about 10 seconds, I didn't wait for any programs to load, but instead IMMEDIATELY clicked on chrome, and it just popped up.

    Like, it didn't wait or anything. It was all "hey what's up dude, you wanna look at some internet?"

    Why yes, chrome. Yes I do. And I want to do it now. Thank you, SSD. Thank you.

  • saint2esaint2e Registered User regular
    Currently on home PC now with OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD... It came out of the box with Firmware 2.22, so I think I'm in good shape.

    Down side is having to re-install wiindows, and finding out my windows 7 disc is corrupt.

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  • RendRend Registered User regular
    saint2e wrote: »
    Currently on home PC now with OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD... It came out of the box with Firmware 2.22, so I think I'm in good shape.

    Down side is having to re-install wiindows, and finding out my windows 7 disc is corrupt.

    Make sure to back up your ethernet drivers.
    Just in case you need to install them without the internet.

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