The Great SSD Project

In this year of 2022, no client computer should still be running with its operating system installed on a mechanical hard disk drive. Conventional spinning drives are just not fast enough to provide a good user experience with today’s software when used as the primary drive. Watching a computer grind itself into the ground as it chews through a Windows update or upgrade is painful, not to mention random slowdowns when Windows decides to hammer the drive for some or another reason.

Knowing that a SSD can extend the life of an older PC by quite a bit, I embarked on a project a few years ago to replace all client PC hard drives with SSD’s instead. It’s been a slow project, limited to replacing about 10 drives a year due to budgetary constraints. Thankfully SSD’s have fallen in price since I started which has enabled me to be able to get to the point where I can purchase many more units at a time and accelerate this project. Having made use of drives from Samsung, Transcend and Western Digital, the project is now entering the end stages with only 5 commonly used PC’s remaining for the swap in the school. I do still have a small computer lab of 14 PC’s that would benefit from the upgrade as well but I have placed that room at the bottom of the priority list as it isn’t used daily.

The cloning process has to date been a bit painful when using Macrium Reflect inside Windows, with clones taking anywhere from 2 hours and up. I’ve since managed to create a Windows PE based version of Reflect which runs quite a bit faster. Regardless however, one can truly feel the sluggish performance of these old 500GB hard drives I am replacing when the clone process happens as the mechanical drive just have no performance. It’s no wonder the PC’s were choking during daily use with these drives grinding themselves into oblivion. Make no mistake, a ten year old 3rd gen Core i3 PC is never going to be a speed demon, but even with a cheap SSD in it, you unlock performance you never knew the PC was capable of.

Even with these upgrades, the old class and office PC’s are well into their twilight years and won’t last forever. CPU performance has come a long way in 10 years and these PC’s will need to be replaced. That being said, never again will a PC be purchased for the school that contains a mechanical hard drive. These days all PC’s or laptops have to be equipped with a NVME based SSD for the best possible performance. Whilst NVME drives are still pricier than SATA based SSD’s, there’s enough performance increases to be totally worth it, not to mention the super convenient M.2 socket.

Thankfully these days many PC’s and laptops are built with a SSD as default, though far too many lower end laptops still unfortunately come with a mechanical drive by default. I am really hoping that trend ends much sooner rather than later as one should not have to open up a newly bought laptop just to swap out the mechanical drive for a SSD in 2022.

Now all that’s left is to format and clean 20+ 500GB mechanical drives and somehow find a use for them or get them sold. Easier said than done though…