2.5" SATA HD replacement options

On 6/16/2015 12:27 AM, Big_Al wrote:
cameo wrote on 6/15/2015 11:15 PM:
The only thing I'm not sure is how the Win7 OS handles the difference
in the drivers. After all, when I first time boot
up with the SSD, the previous SATA drivers will be useless.

I have win 8.1, yet when I changed my HD for an SSD, I had no driver
issues. I always thought Sata is Sata.

Here's an interesting item.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...m-_-22-236-642


It's 2 drives in one. A 120G SSD with a 1TB HD. The price shows $139
US but it came in a sale ad for $109.99
With Promo Code: ESCATKS24
Free Shipping!
Sale ends 6/16 11:59pm PT USA.

The only issue is the thickness of the drive. I think its 9.5mm, a bit
thicker than 7mm drives. You'd have to check your specs. Same goes
for any SSD/HD you put in.

Interesting indeed. Actually, the 9.5 mm would be just right for me. But
I don't know what I would do with all that capacity as my current 250 GB
is more than enough. I just ordered on Amazon a 250GB Samsung SSD drive
for just under $100 which will be 7 mm thick. I might have to pad it
somehow to fill the 9.5 mm space the current drive occupies.

BTW, with solid state drives does it still make sense to do regular
backups? After all, with no moving parts what could go wrong?
I guess it might still provide some insurance against theft or fire.

cameo wrote:


Interesting indeed. Actually, the 9.5 mm would be just right for me. But
I don't know what I would do with all that capacity as my current 250 GB
is more than enough. I just ordered on Amazon a 250GB Samsung SSD drive
for just under $100 which will be 7 mm thick. I might have to pad it
somehow to fill the 9.5 mm space the current drive occupies.

BTW, with solid state drives does it still make sense to do regular
backups? After all, with no moving parts what could go wrong?
I guess it might still provide some insurance against theft or fire.

A good drive would come with a plastic spacer ring.

And you do *more* backups with SSD, than with regular hard drive.
The drive is more likely to brick without warning. It has firmware,
a multicore processor, and one of the cores does maintenance on
the flash setup, while you're doing read/write with the other
cores.

I hope the product you settled on, does not use TLC chips.
But you just know that it does, as the cheapest way to make
a drive, is with VNAND and TLC. What you really want is MLC,
the consumer mainstream Flash type. You would want SLC if they
would sell it to you, but it isn't as dense. It is used in
some Enterprise devices.

SSD drives have high peak power. There are sites which benchmark
the drives, and they measure the power consumed while doing so.
The manufacturer may claim "0.15 watt", when the instrumentation
indicates anywhere from 3.5 watts to 7 watts. This is important
only if you need an explanation for why it gets so hot.

On the one hand, it finishes your commands faster than a regular
drive, so stays at the 3.5W power level only for short periods of time.
But if you use a "punishment script", to do max I/O for a while,
expect the bottom of the laptop to get warm. That's assuming your
setup is fast enough to keep the drive busy. For my gutless single-core
laptop and SATA II interconnect, I doubt a SATA III SSD can do more than
loaf along. No "punishment" possible.

If your drive comes with a "toolbox" software, it will have
a SMART statistic for "Wear Life". Make absolutely sure
you have a backup, before the Wear Life hits zero remaining,
as some drives brick when they hit zero, on purpose. You can
see some of the quirks, here.

http://techreport.com/review/27909/t...heyre-all-dead

Paul

En el artículo , cameo
escribió:

After all, when I first time boot
up with the SSD, the previous SATA drivers will be useless.

No, they won't. They'll work just fine with the SSD.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

En el artículo , cameo
escribió:

I just ordered on Amazon a 250GB Samsung SSD drive
for just under $100 which will be 7 mm thick. I might have to pad it
somehow to fill the 9.5 mm space the current drive occupies.

It may come with a "9.5mm adapter spacer/bracket" which is just a self-
adhesive bit of plastic to increase the thickness to 9.5mm. All Crucial
SSDs come with one in the box.

e.g. http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/...0/_DSC8970.jpg

--
(\_/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

In message , cameo
writes
On 6/15/2015 11:20 PM, . . .winston wrote:



Where did you read that I was building a new system? I'm just trying to
replace an existing SATA drive in a fairly old Win7 laptop. Of course,
I am sure MS will think I have a new system and will want me to pay up
before I can do much work, right?

You shouldn't be asked to enter an activation key. However, as
insurance, make sure you have it. It should be on a sticker on the
bottom of the laptop, but you don't know what it is, before you start
install something like Belarc Advisor (free), and it will tell you (and
just about everything else about the computer). [I note that there seems
to be a portable version of Belarc - ie install it on a memory stick or
a CD - and this might be preferable if your present hard drive is a bit
flaky.]

I can't speak from experience with an SS drive, but if it was a disk,
the easiest procedure to clone your existing drive to the new drive.

If the existing drive is a bit flaky, it might be best to run the PC
from a cloning bootable CD. EaseUS (and several others - all free)
provide this facility. You'll need to run the new drive externally on a
USB adapter.

When the cloning is finished, replace the old drive with the new. When
you boot up, it should boot up more-or-less as though nothing has
happened - apart from realising that there is a new drive, and possibly
suggesting a further reboot to ensure everything works OK.





--
Ian

On 6/16/2015 4:50 AM, Paul wrote:

A good drive would come with a plastic spacer ring.

And you do *more* backups with SSD, than with regular hard drive.
The drive is more likely to brick without warning. It has firmware,
a multicore processor, and one of the cores does maintenance on
the flash setup, while you're doing read/write with the other
cores.

I hope the product you settled on, does not use TLC chips.
But you just know that it does, as the cheapest way to make
a drive, is with VNAND and TLC. What you really want is MLC,
the consumer mainstream Flash type. You would want SLC if they
would sell it to you, but it isn't as dense. It is used in
some Enterprise devices.

SSD drives have high peak power. There are sites which benchmark
the drives, and they measure the power consumed while doing so.
The manufacturer may claim "0.15 watt", when the instrumentation
indicates anywhere from 3.5 watts to 7 watts. This is important
only if you need an explanation for why it gets so hot.

On the one hand, it finishes your commands faster than a regular
drive, so stays at the 3.5W power level only for short periods of time.
But if you use a "punishment script", to do max I/O for a while,
expect the bottom of the laptop to get warm. That's assuming your
setup is fast enough to keep the drive busy. For my gutless single-core
laptop and SATA II interconnect, I doubt a SATA III SSD can do more than
loaf along. No "punishment" possible.

If your drive comes with a "toolbox" software, it will have
a SMART statistic for "Wear Life". Make absolutely sure
you have a backup, before the Wear Life hits zero remaining,
as some drives brick when they hit zero, on purpose. You can
see some of the quirks, here.

http://techreport.com/review/27909/t...heyre-all-dead

Well, if money was no object, I would buy the best current technology,
but as it is now, I have to compromise and get on that's good enough.
So I ordered the Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD. I've generally have a good
experience with anything Samsung makes.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...etailp ages00

On 6/16/2015 5:21 AM, Mike Tomlinson wrote:
En el artículo , cameo
escribió:

After all, when I first time boot
up with the SSD, the previous SATA drivers will be useless.

No, they won't. They'll work just fine with the SSD.

That's good. Thanks.

In article , lid says...

On 6/16/2015 4:50 AM, Paul wrote:

A good drive would come with a plastic spacer ring.

And you do *more* backups with SSD, than with regular hard drive.
The drive is more likely to brick without warning. It has firmware,
a multicore processor, and one of the cores does maintenance on
the flash setup, while you're doing read/write with the other
cores.

I hope the product you settled on, does not use TLC chips.
But you just know that it does, as the cheapest way to make
a drive, is with VNAND and TLC. What you really want is MLC,
the consumer mainstream Flash type. You would want SLC if they
would sell it to you, but it isn't as dense. It is used in
some Enterprise devices.

SSD drives have high peak power. There are sites which benchmark
the drives, and they measure the power consumed while doing so.
The manufacturer may claim "0.15 watt", when the instrumentation
indicates anywhere from 3.5 watts to 7 watts. This is important
only if you need an explanation for why it gets so hot.

On the one hand, it finishes your commands faster than a regular
drive, so stays at the 3.5W power level only for short periods of time.
But if you use a "punishment script", to do max I/O for a while,
expect the bottom of the laptop to get warm. That's assuming your
setup is fast enough to keep the drive busy. For my gutless single-core
laptop and SATA II interconnect, I doubt a SATA III SSD can do more than
loaf along. No "punishment" possible.

If your drive comes with a "toolbox" software, it will have
a SMART statistic for "Wear Life". Make absolutely sure
you have a backup, before the Wear Life hits zero remaining,
as some drives brick when they hit zero, on purpose. You can
see some of the quirks, here.

http://techreport.com/review/27909/t...heyre-all-dead

Well, if money was no object, I would buy the best current technology,
but as it is now, I have to compromise and get on that's good enough.
So I ordered the Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD. I've generally have a good
experience with anything Samsung makes.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...etailp ages00

That's what I put in wife's "Autocad" pc. Choose it based on specs and
reading a few forums. Can't see you being unhappy with it. Problem was
it came for nada to help mount it inside a normal 3.5" enclosure. Try to
find a kit anywhere but online for that!!! It's basically held in at an
offset angle with one screw as it stands right now. That's why I choose
the Kingston for my own pc, e.g. it came with mounting brackets, spacers
and all including the external enclosure for old drive. Added that in
and what was the same price for same size became ....

In message , Ian Jackson
writes

I see that there isn't a Belarc portable. However, 'Windows Product Key
Finder' will give you (only) the key:
http://www.pendriveapps.com/windows-product-key-finder/
It runs straight from the downloaded zip file (no need to extract
first).


--
Ian

Ian Jackson wrote:
'Windows Product Key Finder'

Of course that will report the HP OEM image's install number. I would
choose HP's MS product ID sticker on the notebook's bottom.

--
Mike Easter

In message , Mike Easter
writes
Ian Jackson wrote:
'Windows Product Key Finder'

Of course that will report the HP OEM image's install number. I would
choose HP's MS product ID sticker on the notebook's bottom.

I would have thought that the ID sticker would show the actual product
key for the installed operating system. Any original generic factory
install key, if it had not been changed, would have expired soon after
the owner took possession of the PC.

On this XP Pro machine, Windows Product Key Finder (which I had not
tried before) does give the actual 25-character product key that I used
when I re-installed Windows. This is not surprising, as it happens to be
the same as what was on the sticker!

But it's highly unlikely that Cameo will need to enter a product key
(even for W7). As I understand things, simply cloning a replacement hard
drive shouldn't alert Microsoft that there's possibly some dirty work
afoot.
--
Ian

cameo wrote:
On 6/16/2015 4:50 AM, Paul wrote:

A good drive would come with a plastic spacer ring.

And you do *more* backups with SSD, than with regular hard drive.
The drive is more likely to brick without warning. It has firmware,
a multicore processor, and one of the cores does maintenance on
the flash setup, while you're doing read/write with the other
cores.

I hope the product you settled on, does not use TLC chips.
But you just know that it does, as the cheapest way to make
a drive, is with VNAND and TLC. What you really want is MLC,
the consumer mainstream Flash type. You would want SLC if they
would sell it to you, but it isn't as dense. It is used in
some Enterprise devices.

SSD drives have high peak power. There are sites which benchmark
the drives, and they measure the power consumed while doing so.
The manufacturer may claim "0.15 watt", when the instrumentation
indicates anywhere from 3.5 watts to 7 watts. This is important
only if you need an explanation for why it gets so hot.

On the one hand, it finishes your commands faster than a regular
drive, so stays at the 3.5W power level only for short periods of time.
But if you use a "punishment script", to do max I/O for a while,
expect the bottom of the laptop to get warm. That's assuming your
setup is fast enough to keep the drive busy. For my gutless single-core
laptop and SATA II interconnect, I doubt a SATA III SSD can do more than
loaf along. No "punishment" possible.

If your drive comes with a "toolbox" software, it will have
a SMART statistic for "Wear Life". Make absolutely sure
you have a backup, before the Wear Life hits zero remaining,
as some drives brick when they hit zero, on purpose. You can
see some of the quirks, here.

http://techreport.com/review/27909/t...heyre-all-dead


Well, if money was no object, I would buy the best current technology,
but as it is now, I have to compromise and get on that's good enough.
So I ordered the Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD. I've generally have a good
experience with anything Samsung makes.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...etailp ages00


http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-In.../dp/B00OAJ412U

"What's the difference between the 850 EVO vs the 840 EVO? Thanks.

The 850 EVO uses Samsung's latest 3D TLC NAND"

TLC uses eight voltage levels per storage cell. MLC
uses four voltage levels per storage cell. TLC has
smaller noise margins, when figuring out which
voltage level is inside the cell. With "threshold shift",
it's easier for a storage cell to make a mistake.

I don't know about the flash in question, but some TLC flash
designs have resorted to "two level" design. To hide the write
speed of the three-bit cells, they include a small amount
of pseudo-SLC flash, as a buffer.

TLC will have a slightly reduced write life, compared to MLC.
And the track record so far, is at least one SSD design with
TLC, if data sits "stale" for three months without moving,
the SSD multicore processor inside, reads out that flash
memory at a slower speed. This tells you that the processor
is doing error correction, and probably error correction
on each and every sector of that file being fetched. While
the flash chips reserve extra area for syndrome storage,
and error correction is not a problem, it tells you
"how close to the edge" the technology is.

It's the fact that the advertising copy is not including
the word TLC, that bothers me so much. The manufacturers
should know by now, that we know what they're up to.

Paul

Ian Jackson wrote:
In message , Mike Easter
writes
Ian Jackson wrote:
'Windows Product Key Finder'

Of course that will report the HP OEM image's install number. I would
choose HP's MS product ID sticker on the notebook's bottom.

I would have thought that the ID sticker would show the actual product
key for the installed operating system. Any original generic factory
install key, if it had not been changed, would have expired soon after
the owner took possession of the PC.

On this XP Pro machine, Windows Product Key Finder (which I had not
tried before) does give the actual 25-character product key that I used
when I re-installed Windows. This is not surprising, as it happens to be
the same as what was on the sticker!

But it's highly unlikely that Cameo will need to enter a product key
(even for W7). As I understand things, simply cloning a replacement hard
drive shouldn't alert Microsoft that there's possibly some dirty work
afoot.

There are two product keys on a pre-Windows-8 OEM machine.

The generic (every machine the same) OEM key, of the
as-shipped OS. That's what a JellyBeanFinder would extract.

The COA sticker key, is for reinstalling via a retail
installer DVD. And is for cases where the hard drive
was destroyed, and all mention of the OEM OS is now
gone. It is that COA sticker, which supports
reinstallation from Microsoft media.

Extracting the generic key, the activation server
at Microsoft is going to barf if it sees that. But
the COA sticker key will be OK.

On Windows 8 laptops or desktops, you would not
expect to see a COA sticker. On those, the Windows 8
license key is actually held in a BIOS ACPI table.
Every machine has a different key in the BIOS image.
And any media presented (of Windows 8 vintage), can
see that key and do the right thing instantly. Now, if
you held a Windows 10 RTM DVD in your hand, and offered
that to the computer, would the Win8 key work ? We don't
know at this point. That will be part of the Matrix of
Incomprehensibility, to be discovered after Win10 release.

Paul

On Mon, 15 Jun 2015 20:15:24 -0700, cameo
wrote:

On 6/15/2015 7:24 PM, Ashton Crusher wrote:
On Mon, 15 Jun 2015 10:42:05 -0700, cameo
wrote:

I am sensing that my HP Pavillion tx1000 notebook's 250GB SATA drive's
days are numbered and I have been trying to find a new one to replace it
with. However, this 5400 RPM Western Digital WD2500BEVS-60UST0 model
doesn't seem to be available at a reasonable price and most that pop up
in Google search are used. So I was wondering if perhaps I could look
for other 2.5" SATA models, maybe with higher capacity and higher speed,
but I am worried what kind of compatibility problems I could face then.
Even if the electrical interface is the same, they might not fit into
the caddy the original drive is in. What about SATA II or SATA III
upgrades? Has any of you done this kind of laptop HD replacement and
could give me some pointers? Thanks.


Give serious thought to getting an SSD drive. I put one in to replace
a 5400 SATA drive in my old aspire one and it gave that old, formerly
very slow, net book a new lease on life. Like the proverbial night
and day.

I think you guys convinced me about going with an SSD drive. Googling
some more on the subject, I see that this is not as bad way to go as I
originally thought. Especially considering the speed improvement!
I use Acronis to make a full PC backup and that should make restore to
the SSD pretty easy. The only thing I'm not sure is how the Win7 OS
handles the difference in the drivers. After all, when I first time boot
up with the SSD, the previous SATA drivers will be useless.

I used acronis to switch my Aspire to the SSD. I had one problem and
that was when I did the "restore" of the backup to the SSD it had two
boxes checked on the setup screen. One of the boxes was for "the
C:drive" and the other was for the "boot record" or something like
that. Both seemed to be checked by default so I left them that way. I
could not get teh computer to recognize the SSD drive. I went thru
making a new image a couple times and doing the restore to the new
drive several times and it wouldn't boot. I could find nothing useful
on Acronis site for help. Finally I unchecked the "restore boot
record" checkmark and that restore to the SSD booted!!!

On Tue, 16 Jun 2015 00:20:30 -0700, cameo
wrote:

On 6/15/2015 11:20 PM, . . .winston wrote:
cameo wrote:
On 6/15/2015 7:24 PM, Ashton Crusher wrote:
On Mon, 15 Jun 2015 10:42:05 -0700, cameo
wrote:

I am sensing that my HP Pavillion tx1000 notebook's 250GB SATA drive's
days are numbered and I have been trying to find a new one to
replace it
with. However, this 5400 RPM Western Digital WD2500BEVS-60UST0 model
doesn't seem to be available at a reasonable price and most that pop up
in Google search are used. So I was wondering if perhaps I could look
for other 2.5" SATA models, maybe with higher capacity and higher
speed,
but I am worried what kind of compatibility problems I could face then.
Even if the electrical interface is the same, they might not fit into
the caddy the original drive is in. What about SATA II or SATA III
upgrades? Has any of you done this kind of laptop HD replacement and
could give me some pointers? Thanks.


Give serious thought to getting an SSD drive. I put one in to replace
a 5400 SATA drive in my old aspire one and it gave that old, formerly
very slow, net book a new lease on life. Like the proverbial night
and day.

I think you guys convinced me about going with an SSD drive. Googling
some more on the subject, I see that this is not as bad way to go as I
originally thought. Especially considering the speed improvement!
I use Acronis to make a full PC backup and that should make restore to
the SSD pretty easy. The only thing I'm not sure is how the Win7 OS
handles the difference in the drivers. After all, when I first time boot
up with the SSD, the previous SATA drivers will be useless.

Why would you need the earlier machine's SATA drivers if you are
building a new system with an SSD ?

If Win7 doesn't provide a SATA driver to operate in ACHI mode, you'll
need to provide one during the Windows setup and prior to installing
Windows....the drive needs to be ready for Windows to install.

Where did you read that I was building a new system? I'm just trying to
replace an existing SATA drive in a fairly old Win7 laptop. Of course, I
am sure MS will think I have a new system and will want me to pay up
before I can do much work, right?



I've swapped several HDs with new ones with the image of old ones on
them and windows has never objected. I think you need to be doing a
new motherboard to make it phone home.