Solid State Drives

Jim Jensen · April 19, 2022, 09:51:23 AM

I think I've bought my last computer with a spinning hard drive. I know, some of you abandoned them a while ago. My own station was taking too long to restart and I was frustrated with a couple of programs running slow (like Chrome). My Surface always starts super quickly and rarely has speed issues (granted I don't require as much on it as my workstation in the office). I found a Western Digital 1 TB SSD for about $90 and cloned my existing hard drive. Now it restarts far quicker and has few issues with latency. Cheapest most valuable upgrade I've ever done. Also increased the RAM for nickels and dimes. When I looked at a replacement computer, I found quite a price premium if you want a SSD larger than 500GB. That's enough for all of the other units here, but not mine. Heck this deal was way cheaper than the increased price from Dell to go from HDD to SSD at any size!

Mark · April 19, 2022, 10:55:39 AM

Spinning drives are definitely the bottleneck!

Ric · April 19, 2022, 10:58:15 AM

Quote from: Jim Jensen on April 19, 2022, 09:51:23 AM
I think I've bought my last computer with a spinning hard drive. I know, some of you abandoned them a while ago. My own station was taking too long to restart and I was frustrated with a couple of programs running slow (like Chrome). My Surface always starts super quickly and rarely has speed issues (granted I don't require as much on it as my workstation in the office). I found a Western Digital 1 TB SSD for about $90 and cloned my existing hard drive. Now it restarts far quicker and has few issues with latency. Cheapest most valuable upgrade I've ever done. Also increased the RAM for nickels and dimes. When I looked at a replacement computer, I found quite a price premium if you want a SSD larger than 500GB. That's enough for all of the other units here, but not mine. Heck this deal was way cheaper than the increased price from Dell to go from HDD to SSD at any size!

SSD's are great. We started buying Lenovo (tiny) Thinkcentre units for 3-4 years and have recently replaced our last HDD production unit ([purchased 4-5 years ago). They have been excellent, reliable desktop units. They boot up / reboot quickly and run fast.

Personally I've been on my second M$ Surface Pro (version 3 and now 6) with SSD. They have been great except as you mentioned the cost of large SSD's

Side note: I use Dropbox for cloud backup for my main personal backup and am quite annoyed with them. Even with a 500GB SSD, that's only 1/4 of the 2TB that I am buying. They don't allow me to upload/backup other locations such as the D: drive could have another 500MB, and we have a NAS that I would love to cloud backup.
Just a bit of a rant but the bottom line is SSD are great!

Jeff Zylstra · April 19, 2022, 11:00:04 AM

Just be careful running any kind of disk defragmenting programs on SSD drives. It's unnecessary for one, and possible damaging for another if it's run all the time. Does Windows still recognize SSD drives and disable the old disk defrag program?

Ric · April 19, 2022, 11:21:57 AM

Quote from: Jeff Zylstra on April 19, 2022, 11:00:04 AM
Just be careful running any kind of disk defragmenting programs on SSD drives. It's unnecessary for one, and possible damaging for another if it's run all the time. Does Windows still recognize SSD drives and disable the old disk defrag program?

Good point Jeff!

I've never considered defragging/optimizing an SSD because of the reason you mention.

BTW: Optimization is still an option in the Lenovo ThinkCentre so I'd say "no"

Definitely a danger.

If things have gotten clunky in the past I have resorted to confirming a good backup, wiping the drive and reinstalling the o/s and apps

Mark · April 19, 2022, 12:21:29 PM

Quote from: Jeff Zylstra on April 19, 2022, 11:00:04 AM
Just be careful running any kind of disk defragmenting programs on SSD drives. It's unnecessary for one, and possible damaging for another if it's run all the time. Does Windows still recognize SSD drives and disable the old disk defrag program?

I can't remember the last time I've used disk defrag. Maybe windows XP? Maybe, MAYBE, early Windows 7.

Billy Welsh · April 19, 2022, 04:50:30 PM

I got a strange cryptic disk error message on my Lenovo laptop with SSD when it was maybe 4-5 months old. I made the mistake of ignoring it (it's a freakin' SSD!) and a few days later I was restoring the OS and reinstalling all my applications

Mark · April 19, 2022, 05:00:33 PM

I have seen some important firmware updates for SSD. If I remember right, if you ignored one of them the drive stopped working either after x number of writes (which was very very low) or a specific date. Something like that.

Billy Welsh · April 19, 2022, 06:28:17 PM

I have replaced that particular laptop with another, larger Lenovo. The "old" one went to a new employee who has younger eyes than mine

Rest assured the next time anything remotely like that pops up, I WILL pay attention. Lesson learned!

Jeff Zylstra · May 13, 2022, 12:11:07 PM

One of the reasons I'm liking Dell computers more these days is their Dell Command Update software. It checks for updates to BIOS, NICs, Video, Chipsets, etc... All the things that 99% of us aren't updating, but really need to be updated on a very regular basis. I've found less errors and better performance since running these updates. And SSD drive firmware are one of the things push out periodically.

Ric · May 13, 2022, 03:50:48 PM

Lenovo Commercial Vantage makes bios updates easy. They simply need to be run which is on my mothly maintnance list for all of our production machines.

Tom Fisher · May 18, 2022, 08:22:10 AM

To what Jeff and Ric said ... Absolutely, both the Dell and the Lenovo software have made driver and bios updates super easy.

The BIOS updates are becoming more necessary than in the past. It used to be the 'if it aint broke, don't update it' on BIOS, but many of the more recent BIOS updates are actually to mitigate known security issues - so Just Do It (tm).

Ric · May 18, 2022, 01:21:12 PM

Quote from: Tom Fisher on May 18, 2022, 08:22:10 AM
To what Jeff and Ric said ... Absolutely, both the Dell and the Lenovo software have made driver and bios updates super easy.

The BIOS updates are becoming more necessary than in the past. It used to be the 'if it aint broke, don't update it' on BIOS, but many of the more recent BIOS updates are actually to mitigate known security issues - so Just Do It (tm).

I wish BIOS updates on the fairly new Dell server that runs our virtual Windows network / vMware were that easy

Jeff Golas · May 18, 2022, 06:21:29 PM

Quote from: Ric on May 18, 2022, 01:21:12 PM
Quote from: Tom Fisher on May 18, 2022, 08:22:10 AM
To what Jeff and Ric said ... Absolutely, both the Dell and the Lenovo software have made driver and bios updates super easy.

The BIOS updates are becoming more necessary than in the past. It used to be the 'if it aint broke, don't update it' on BIOS, but many of the more recent BIOS updates are actually to mitigate known security issues - so Just Do It (tm).

I wish BIOS updates on the fairly new Dell server that runs our virtual Windows network / vMware were that easy

They can be - if you have an iDrac you may be able to update it via that, but if not, what I did was build a USB key for freedos, then copy the bios updater/bios files over to that for quick and easy bios updating. Im pretty sure you can actually still get a DOS updater. (If not - Linux or WinCE)

Ric · May 19, 2022, 09:37:27 AM

Quote from: Jeff Golas on May 18, 2022, 06:21:29 PM
Quote from: Ric on May 18, 2022, 01:21:12 PM
Quote from: Tom Fisher on May 18, 2022, 08:22:10 AM
To what Jeff and Ric said ... Absolutely, both the Dell and the Lenovo software have made driver and bios updates super easy.

The BIOS updates are becoming more necessary than in the past. It used to be the 'if it aint broke, don't update it' on BIOS, but many of the more recent BIOS updates are actually to mitigate known security issues - so Just Do It (tm).

I wish BIOS updates on the fairly new Dell server that runs our virtual Windows network / vMware were that easy

They can be - if you have an iDrac you may be able to update it via that, but if not, what I did was build a USB key for freedos, then copy the bios updater/bios files over to that for quick and easy bios updating. Im pretty sure you can actually still get a DOS updater. (If not - Linux or WinCE)

Thanx Jeff.

We do have an iDrac but I have no knowledge of how to access it. Generally it is used by the fine folks at Redbird who manage our server. The last time they did a firmware update the tech mentioned how convoluted and difficult it was (cost us a few hundred $$$ too).

My longing is for a truly simple app that opens with a click, checks for updates with another click, installs the updates with yet another click and then asks to be rebooted - and finished with one last click. 4 or 5 clicks would be preferable and during the business day to boot with the update being able to reboot overnight.

Longing for something akin to Lenovo Commercial Vantage for our server.

Mark · May 23, 2022, 12:35:16 PM

Quote from: Ric on May 19, 2022, 09:37:27 AM

We do have an iDrac but I have no knowledge of how to access it. Generally it is used by the fine folks at Redbird who manage our server. The last time they did a firmware update the tech mentioned how convoluted and difficult it was (cost us a few hundred $$$ too).

With my firmware updates via iDRAC, I have to disable a bunch of ports on the switch or LifeCycle manager doesn't get internet (due to how the network ports are aggregated). So it is a process, which I have down fairly decently.

1) Migrate all VMs off host and put into maintenance mode
2) Reboot to Lifecycle Controller
3) Disable 3 of 4 ports in the Switch LAG group (copy and paste into Cisco cli - super easy)
4) Go through the update process through final reboot (if more that one)
5) Enable switch ports via another cli copy and paste
6) Take out of maintenance mode & migrate VM back and move to next server to rinse and repeat
7) Be sad about how old these servers are and imagine a world with newer servers and newer tech that would make this even easier while setting unrealistic expectations of vendors and my own reality.

I think I typed that last part out loud.