SOLVED New hard drive wanted for storage

[Grizzly]

Soooooo... I got my new SSD's and everything went haywire. I do not know yet if I got faulty SSD's or my laptops simply cannot handle two SSD's. Maybe its just because these WD are so power hungry that my laptops cannot provide adequate functionality. nevertheless, I put my old spinners in again and everything is peachy.
My problems started when I first installed the new ssd's. on both my laptops I was not able to start any app from the taskbar, the start menu would not even open.on my main pc I got so far that I reinstalled an image that I made a couple of days before that. I still had a lot of problems (one of them was a network issue as both laptops could not see each other - solved with installing the spinners again but I have no idea why). Gonna use the ssd's as OS discs, see what happens then....
Maybe I bought the wrong ones, even though the Samsung I have use only slightly less power whereas my OWC ssd's use only half of it (at 0.8A)....
Dunno what went wrong as occasionally the new ssd's are not even recognized in the BIOS. I can't imagine though that both drives are faulty.gonna test them a little and see what is coming up with them

 

[Clintlgm]

Sounds like driver issue to me have you tried running them on the RST driver? I've never had an issue with a SATA SSD. Now then the M.2 NVME SSD can be a problems. There are no moving parts so Power supply should be plenty SSD don't need a lot with no platters to spin.

 

[Grizzly]

Sounds like driver issue to me have you tried running them on the RST driver? I've never had an issue with a SATA SSD. Now then the M.2 NVME SSD can be a problems. There are no moving parts so Power supply should be plenty SSD don't need a lot with no platters to spin.

I have to disagree. SSD's use much more power than spinners do. I have only USB2 ports to hook up to and spinners do not use more than about 600mA which is what this port can support. A SSD uses up to 1600mA which requires two USB ports. Even though SSD does not have moving parts, RAM chips use more energy but also are considerably faster than magnetic Drives (Spinners). Just take a look on the label of the drive. The power ratings are usually listed on the drive.
All the spinners I have (mobile) do not use more than 600mA while the SSD start at 800mA and way up to 1600mA.

That my idea of using a SSD as data storage is not working may be due to the fact that the port they are connected to was used for a optical disc drive which, like a spinner, does not use that much power....
Maybe my laptops are too old for that (they are 9 and 11 years old)

 

[Norton]

Have to agree with Grizzly. Most, if not all USB 2 ports are rated at 5vdc/500ma. USB 3 USB 3.0 specified 900 mA at 5 V, or 4.5 watts. All my storage devices are WD Blue spinners, never had any problems.

 

[Wolfie]

HI @Grizzly ,

did you check for any special UEFI/BIOS settings for the drive control that you might have?:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-optimize-ssd-speed-and-performance/

 

[Grizzly]

Wolfie, all those settings in your link are set. I am thinking that my laptops are too old to use it in the ODD bay. SSD's work just fine where the Main HDD used to be. I am gonna leave the spinner as storage drive for my files until further notice. Don't know yet what I am gonna do with the SSD drive I have purchased for that.

 

[Bruce Scherzinger]

Why not just replace the current SSD with a bigger one?

 

[Denbigh Gabbitas]

I have an Alien M14X, it came with 256G spinner. I changed the 256 to a 1T SSD, but noticed it had a mSATA space, and now I have OS on 256G (mSATA Samsung evo 950) and data on the 1T SATA (Crucial some number other, not as fast as the evolution, but fast enough).

No difficulties in doing it, used Acronis disk cloning to move stuff.

Ask me why I need so much space. Cos it's there!

 

[Comp Cmndo]

They do have USB sticks that are comparable to SSD speeds.
VisionTek has a 240GB for $140.
SanDisk Exteme Pro is another one, 240GB for $140

You will need a USB 3.0 or 3.1 interface to take advantage of the speed.

There are also some very fast spinners, Western Digital Scorpio Black, 7200rpm in a 2.5 in form factor. I've got an old 320GB that's SATA 2. Power consumption is 0.58A @ 5VDC

Newer ones are SATA 3 available in 1TB.

 

[bondr006]

I have an 1TB Samsung 850 Evo SSD in my laptop(HP ENVY TouchSmart Quad Edition, 4th Gen 2.8GHz i7-4900MQ, NVIDIA GT 740M 2GB, 15.6" 1080P HD LED Touch Display, 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, 1TB Samsung 850 Evo SSD, Win 10 Pro). For backup, I have two 3 TB external WD's. One is network attached, and one is USB 3.0. Both have backup software on them that has been working very well for me. I set up the network attached storage so I can access it from anywhere. I could never go back to a spinner for my main laptop drive, but the external backups are fine. Also, as a side note....I love my Evo. I have never had a problem with it, and I love the Samsung Magician software that came with it. Keeps the drive healthy and running in top condition.

 

[Grizzly]

Why not just replace the current SSD with a bigger one?

cause I have several different systems that need access to the files on the second hard drive. Its stuff that I need on a daily basis. I just swap the OS drive and thats it.

to answer

I have an Alien M14X, it came with 256G spinner. I changed the 256 to a 1T SSD, but noticed it had a mSATA space, and now I have OS on 256G (mSATA Samsung evo 950) and data on the 1T SATA (Crucial some number other, not as fast as the evolution, but fast enough).

No difficulties in doing it, used Acronis disk cloning to move stuff.

Ask me why I need so much space. Cos it's there!

I only need 500GB as storage for my most important files, everything else is stored on several external drives as multiple backups (I have my files stored at least in three different places).

You will need a USB 3.0 or 3.1 interface to take advantage of the speed.

therein lies the catch. My laptops are simply too old to provide usb3, they do not even have sata II or sata III.

for now I will use my spinners as storage. I may get another drive from OWC. they built primary SSD's for Mac's but they work in PC's as well (I have two 120GB drives that only use 800mA of current compared to the 1600mA of the WD I just bought)....

 

[Bighorn]

For interchangeability between my Windows, Linux and macOS computers I use External drives up to 500GB formatted as FAT32 using GPARTED on the Linux but on the larger drives I use exFAT to handle the large file sizes, 4GB and larger. My latest WDC 4TB drive came formatted as exFAT. I've never been satisfied with the programs available for the Mac to read and write NTFS drives.

 

[astral]

I haven't worked with a Notebook that could contain 2 HDDs in a number of years. Just a couple of minor things, an SSD should produce less heat in a Notebook than an HDD and SanDisk is now owned by Western Digital, a bit over a year now.

I am not sure that you are right about the heat issue
I have Samsung Evo 850 installed and Hard Disk Sentinel often shows that the SSD is running
as high as 50C

 

[Wolfie]

What about NAS?:

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401086,00.asp

MIght be a good option?.

 

[clifford_cooley]

I am not sure that you are right about the heat issue
I have Samsung Evo 850 installed and Hard Disk Sentinel often shows that the SSD is running
as high as 50C

You may not be sure, but I am. I also have Samsung 850 EVO in my machine.

 

[Grizzly]

I tried to install the second SSD on my Laptops again and finally found out why everything is going haywire. It turns out that the Drive interfaces for the previous DVD drive has a drastically reduced data speed compared to the main drive. The main drive interface has a throughput of 3GB/s while the dvd interface only has 1.5GB/s on my Toshiba and my HP laptop which is older only has on the main drive (1.5GB/s), the dvd interface was not detectable by the samsung software (both are samsung drives).
What I also noticed is that accessing the data drive takes considerable longer with the SSD than it takes with the spinner drive (programs start to not respond as well if needed access to the data drive).
The same issue on both laptops. I am going to put the spinners for the data drive back in and run the OS on the SSD.

This is the end of this story until I get new hardware but that may take a while....

 

[Bighorn]

So boiled down, you seem to be saying the ODD works fine on SATA 1 connection but the SSD or HDD needs SATA 2 or faster to get the better performance.

 

[Grizzly]

Well, on both laptops (did I mention they were very old?) the ODD has a PATA interface while the HDD has an SATA interface (the caddy where I have the second drive in, has a built in SATA to PATA converter). I may have to put everything on one drive again (in different partitions) to gain some more throughput and abandon the idea of having a separate HDD for my data although with my spinners as second drive it works pretty good. Unfortunately those spinners have some age on them as well (they are now 7 years old) and may fail at any time. I will worry about that in due time....
For now I will leave it as it is with the SSD as primary drive and the HDD as secondary drive and no ODD (never used it anyway).
The idea behind putting two SSD in, was to make the laptop a little more quiet and also benefit from the SSD. Well, as the saying goes " the chain is only as strong as its weakest link" .
I was hoping to get a little more performance out of both but apparently did not think it all the way through. That is on me....