Solid state drive upgrades

I just upgraded to windows 8 today myself - have the 8.1 preview running. I've had to force it to load to desktop view, add my computer icon and customise the start screen up a bit. The OS is very good, fast and has some good features. It will take me time to adjust to the new metro ui though and the os does kind of force it on you.

Also looking at the samsung evo solid state drives, i would like the 256gb model which performs very similar to the pro model but about 60 euro cheaper.

Yep. Would never go back to an ordinary hard drive now except for back ups. Win 8 boots up really fast and have had no issues with it over the past few months. The non-pro Samsung should be fine if you are using SATA 2. With SATA 3 you would see the extra speed of the Pro version.

Does the non pro version come with software to copy hard drives?

Yes, mine did. It can also be easily downloaded from the Samsung site. Worked well for the two drives I installed.

www.samsung.com/global/business/semicond...ngssd/downloads.html

Just chiming in here, I typically stick to two manufacturers of Solid State drives, Corsair and Plextor, I stay away from OCZ and Samsumg as a rule, I have known people have major issues with both.

Corsair give darn good performance and so do plextor, in my work laptop I bought a Plextor 256Gb SSD that does 100k IOPS, people quite often make a mistake of how much MB/Sec it can do, I am in the storage side of virtualization and I am the Global Tech lead for a product in VMware called Virtual SAN, so I have to look at SSD performance very critically, it's all about the IOPS and not MB/Sec, this will determine how your SSD Will perform.

The new drives have a much lower failure rate, and one thing you should always remember is never to repeatedly fill up your SSD to the Max, they have a max number of writes before they start to fail, the newer 3rd and 4th generation SSD's have a higher lifetime capacity, typically 25 times the 2nd generation

If you are considering an SSD drive, feel free to drop me a PM, I'll give you free advice

I usually buy all of my gear from Scan Computers in the UK, I have known the owner for almost 20 years like, and I have been into IT for almost as long

Simon