My hard drive (data only) is becoming noisy at times and is very old, probably 12 years. I hope to replace it with a solid state drive.
I am looking at a Samsung 870 Evo. I understand hard drives are 3.5 inches wide with solid state drives 2.5 inches and therefore a cradle will be needed. Will any cradle do or does it need to match the specific SSD? Will any cables be needed or is it just a case of moving the existing cables?
Finally, I already have a 256MB SSD for the operating system and programs. My thought was to add the new SSD as a data drive. Would it be better practice to place the OS and programs on the new 1TB drive?
The drives are a standard size so any cradle will do. SSDs are sufficiently light that they don't have to fit in a drive bay - I've previously just taped them to the casing if I didn't have a convenient bay.
Assuming your system is less than 15 years old, the cabling should be a direct swap. Although you may find it easier to install the HDD and SSD together, to make it easier to copy data across. That would require an additional SATA data cable (assuming a spare port on the motherboard), and hopefully your PSU has a spare SATA power connector. If you have a DVD you could steal the connections from there for the duration of the copying, and you wouldn't need any extra cables.
It doesn't really matter either way, although moving the existing Windows partition you are currently running is somewhat more complicated. Keeping it as a data drive would be simpler.
Should be fairly straightforward. There is software for Windows to make it easier, if partitioning the new drive and copying the files across is too much. But that is really only a handful of clicks in Windows.
2.5" SSDs match the size and connector arrangements of 2.5" HDDs and any cradle will do. Check first though, as many machines have positions that will take a 2.5" drive anyway and you may not need to use the existing
3.5" position.
I'd use whichever one had the fastest data rates, but 256MB is a bit small these days and you might run out of room for the OS and Applications there.
Yes. Many drive manufacturers make programs to clone your existing drive to the new one available on their websites and Samsung seem to.
Another thing to check is your motherboard. If it has an M2 slot, then you can buy an M2 SSD that will plug straight into the motherboard and potentially give you a far faster transfer rate.
You have to check carefully though, as some motherboards support M2-SATA, some M2-PCI-E and some M2-NVME, so you have to get the matching type of SSD.
Can I do this visually or does it need research? The machine is an HP Pavilion (p6235uk) probably 12 years old so I was assuming it would be of the older design.
Are the cables for your old hard drive the same as for your new one? I.e SATA rather than 40 pin IDE. Sata are about 8mm wide & IDE about 45mm wide. The mounting threads are standard size & spacing for all 2.5" drives. I prefer separate drives for the Operating System & data but a larger partitioned drive is also acceptable. If the drive is only for data you can just add the data & power cables to your new SSD drive & turn the PC back on. The drive will probably need to be initialised & formatted which sounds complicated but is quite easy. You can look up how to do it or post back for instructions.
If it's 12 years old it won't have an M.2 slot and won't boot off an NVMe SSD (btw, M.2 PCIe and M.2 NVMe are the same thing). An M.2 SATA drive would still work in an adapter, but there's no advantage over a 2.5" SATA SSD in that case.
[An NVMe SSD on a PCIe card (either directly or via an M.2 to PCIe adapter) would be somewhat faster than SATA but not bootable on this machine. An option, but I'd say the extra speed wouldn't be worth it if you might ever want to use it as a boot drive in this machine. The upgrade from a HDD will be fast enough]
Likely that the new drive will come with a cut down version of clone my drive onto the new one (do a backup first!). It is normally routine and painless but if anything goes wrong serious data loss can occur.
The other thing to check is the manual for the old motherboard since it many offer both SATA (150) and the faster second generation SATA-II (300). More recent ones offer SATA-II & SATA-III. SSD's are always best on the fastest available SATA port that the machine has.
SATA I or II will somewhat hobble a modern fast SSD but it will still be a *lot* faster than spinning rust (particularly one on its last legs). That may be an issue in cloning it if there is a bad patch you may test out seldom trodden paths in the cloning software's error handling.
My Samsung 850 EVO can completely saturate the bandwidth of the even faster SATA-III (600) connector. That's the last SATA SSD I have.
M2 is always preferable if your motherboard supports it. (and not necessarily all that much more expensive)
A year ago, I had an EVO 870 fitted to my PC - the old drive was nearly full. After only 11 months, it failed fairly catastrophically. Luckily most of my important data was on Dropbox.
The mounting points for both 3.5" and 2.5" drives are standard, so the cradles are interchangeable. They vary from very simple bent bits of metal to slightly more elaborate ones that will let you mount 2 smaller drives in one larger bay.
Note you may not need a cradle - many cases have internal mounting points for 2.5" drives anyway. (and since they are light and have no moving parts, can quite often be mounted on some adhesive velcro tape or similar).
The existing ones should do (unless you change the mounting location too much!)
There is a good argument for having data on a separate drive. The justification for using the new one for OS and apps might be if it is significantly higher in performance than the existing 250GB drive.
(a Samsung Evo 870 is a fast SSD - it will typically saturate a 6GB/s SATA interface, and give sustained 550+MB/sec read speeds. It also has a decenet amount of DRAM cache to keep write performance high. To go faster than that you would need to move away from SATA to a drive on a NVMe interface)
Yup, very easy. I have managed to talk complete novices through the process on the phone many times (having had the required bits sent to them).
If you have the space in the existing machine and a spare SATA interface, then add the drive, run some cloning software, and then remove (or re-purpose) the old drive. If there is no space, treat yourself to a USB3 to SATA adaptor (about £10 for a good one) and plug the new drive in externally to clone to it, and then swap out the internal.
As can happen with any drive. Reliable backup is the solution!
However of all the SSDs I have used (and I have bought many hundreds), the Sumsung drives have so far had the lowest failure rate. At the good end, Kingston/HyperX "Savage" have been close to faultless, Kingston SSD now Pretty good (and less than 3 failures out of 100+). At the bad end Muskin getting on for 80%+ failures within a couple of years. AData even worse! (and a very high infant mortality rate).
I might consider leaving the old HDD in the machine, and after copying stuff across using it as a backup. There is software that will retain versions of files, just in case something gets overwritten.
The other thing about being a data drive, there shouldn't be any reason to have issues with locked files that you might get with the C drive.
On Thu, 14 Apr 2022 13:45:15 +0100, John Rumm snipped-for-privacy@nowhere.null wrote: [snip]
Thanks to everyone. This has proved to be an adventure. I opened the machine and worked out how to remove the cradle and looked at all the cables. One of the cables seemed to be loose and at a twisted angle. When I tried to adjust this, I broke it. Unfortunately, this turned out to be the cable for the primary drive. I took it to a computer shop nearby and he helpfully fixed the problem for £18. Maybe I should get him to install the SSD?
As I now understand it, I only need a cradle or similar to hold the new SSD and the existing cables will fit. Mr Memory told me a completely different story, that I needed a mounting kit and I would need to buy Kingston to get this.
What is the difference between a basic SSD tray caddy, which seems to be a shaped bit of steel with holes in it, and a converter drive adapter, which has a port on it and costs three times as much?
It was the mounting to the motherboard that I broke. I think most of the charge would be labour although he did replace the cable.
I'm not too bothered about the cost of the mount. I am more interested in whether there is any more checking to do to ensure the existing cables are fit for purpose.
Looking further, this does seem to be the explanation.
Yup... and as others have said, the cradle is often not necessary.
Some retail packaged SSDs come with basic mounting kits. Handy if you need one, but probably not enough incentive to go for it unless you also want that make/model of SSD.
A cradle is basically a passive thing to allow the different sized bits to be screwed into place. You can also get a caddie that will allow a SATA drive to be mounted on a USB port - that is an active adaptor with a small interface chip to allow one hardware interface to be connected to the other and presented as a USB mass storage device.
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