External SSD drive

[MJ224]

If I was to buy an external SSD drive, what size is good?

I know, how long is a piece of string? My main requirement is to speed up LR and PS loading, and other not so often used programmes, and maybe put the OS (W10) onto it....

I see there are 250GB SSDs for reasonable prices...…….What if it fails , presumably back ups deal with that scenario...……..

Any pitfalls and general advice appreciated...

[Keith-369]

Re: External SSD drive

Plenty of 1T drives around now at good prices, USB3 and self powered by the USB connection. That's what I'd go for.

[Jim Ford]

Re: External SSD drive

Backup using 'clonezilla':

https://clonezilla.org

You can backup any OS with it.

Jim

[MJ224]

Re: External SSD drive

Plenty of 1T drives around now at good prices, USB3 and self powered by the USB connection. That's what I'd go for.

Backup using 'clonezilla':

https://clonezilla.org

You can backup any OS with it.

Jim

[Naughty Nigel]

Re: External SSD drive

Plenty of 1T drives around now at good prices, USB3 and self powered by the USB connection. That's what I'd go for.

That would be a good plan, but if the machine doesn't have USB 3 sockets then you wouldn't gain anything in the way of speed.

Recent spinning hard drives are also quite quick for keeping data on. Things slow down though when you have virtual memory on a spinning disk.

[Keith-369]

Re: External SSD drive

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=samsung...b_sb_ss_i_4_15

[MJ224]

Re: External SSD drive

[Keith-369]

Re: External SSD drive

The one I mentioned, the Samsung 860 Evo, is an internal sata drive but USB3 caddys to hold it are very cheap and reliable if you wanted an external drive. Doing it that way, you can use the drive as an internal one later down the line if you wanted to. Best of both worlds.

edit to add - I bought an inateck FE2004 case (again from Amazon) and it works perfectly with SSD and standard 2.5inch drives.

[griffljg]

Re: External SSD drive

Hi Mark,

A bit of a round-about tale, but here goes:

A couple of years ago, my then 6 year old iMac was getting unacceptably slow. I had already added a 4TB external mechanical drive to hold all my photos and so the internal 2TB mechanical drive was nowhere near even a quarter full. The slowness problem was nothing that the addition of a bit of RAM (from 12GB to 32GB) and a defrag wouldn't fix, but the internal drive was getting a bit old anyway. How much longer would it last?

I applied my old university days professor's adage: Take as much space as you think you'll need and triple it. With the photos now moved onto the external drive, the old prof's suggestion led me to about 1TB. (250GB + a bit extra for a "buffer" and then multiply by 3.) This fitted in well with the fact that internal 1TB internal SSD drives were at a bit of a "sweet spot" just then.

So I upgraded the iMac by expanding the RAM from 12GB to 32GB and the replaced the 2TB internal mechanical hard disk drive with a 1TB internal SSD drive. That has totally transformed the iMac and given it a whole new lease of life..... Except that I can't upgrade it past "High Sierra" as the new versions of the operating system don't have support for the old graphics cards.

After two years, the 1TB internal SSD is just over half full and so it looks like the old prof's rule is working well.

So....... Take as much space as you think you will need and multiply by three. Actually, he used the same rule for extimating how long a software development task would take (for project management purposes), but that is another story.

[TimP]

[wornish]

Re: External SSD drive

[MJ224]

[wornish]

Re: External SSD drive

I did a search on youtube and found a video showing step by step how to replace the internal drive with an SSD for exactly my model of laptop it can be a bit fiddly and each laptop model is different.

Also, make sure first you have the software that can copy the window system across to the SSD correctly. The internal drive is connected directly to a SATA interface and there are different variants with different pinouts again check compatibility first.

Finally if you just get the bare SSD you will need a SATA to USB adapter in order to get the Windows system on to the SSD before you install it.

Here is a link to the video I used for my HP laptop. there are similar ones for other models

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LtXLs85lrY"]How to install SSD in HP 15 | Hard Drive replacement - YouTube[/ame]

Here is link explaining how to transfer the software. (the guys' accent will make you pay attention

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDDqNZaibE8"]How to migrate OS Windows to SSD | Clone Hard Drive or SSD - YouTube[/ame]

[blu-by-u]

Re: External SSD drive

Hi Mark,

A bit of a round-about tale, but here goes:

A couple of years ago, my then 6 year old iMac was getting unacceptably slow. I had already added a 4TB external mechanical drive to hold all my photos and so the internal 2TB mechanical drive was nowhere near even a quarter full. The slowness problem was nothing that the addition of a bit of RAM (from 12GB to 32GB) and a defrag wouldn't fix, but the internal drive was getting a bit old anyway. How much longer would it last?

I applied my old university days professor's adage: Take as much space as you think you'll need and triple it. With the photos now moved onto the external drive, the old prof's suggestion led me to about 1TB. (250GB + a bit extra for a "buffer" and then multiply by 3.) This fitted in well with the fact that internal 1TB internal SSD drives were at a bit of a "sweet spot" just then.

So I upgraded the iMac by expanding the RAM from 12GB to 32GB and the replaced the 2TB internal mechanical hard disk drive with a 1TB internal SSD drive. That has totally transformed the iMac and given it a whole new lease of life..... Except that I can't upgrade it past "High Sierra" as the new versions of the operating system don't have support for the old graphics cards.

After two years, the 1TB internal SSD is just over half full and so it looks like the old prof's rule is working well.

So....... Take as much space as you think you will need and multiply by three. Actually, he used the same rule for extimating how long a software development task would take (for project management purposes), but that is another story.

Sadly MacBooks from a few years ago have their SSD soldered in. Silly of them as the SSD now are so much cheaper and I need to change a whole new MacBook just because I needed a bigger drive.

[MJ224]

Re: External SSD drive

Thanks again. I need to understand the Clonezilla programme. It says it needs certain parameters to work.

" and it is used to deploy many computers simultaneously. It is an extremely useful tool, however, it does have several limitations. In order to use it, you must first prepare a DRBL server AND the machine to be deployed must boot from a network (e.g. PXE/iPXE).",