yeah, I don't know how I managed to survive with a boot drive HDD for so long maybe something to do with Windows 7 being lighter, but still it took a few minutes to fully boot
My daughter just inherited my niece's old laptop. It's about a 12 year old Compaq. A few days ago, I swapped the HDD for an SSD. It does make a huge difference. I had done the same for my laptop several years ago. It was honestly like a brand new computer. It's really one of the cheapest, easiest upgrades you can do for an older system.
My 20 year old coworker was talking about how slow a computer that took about 50 seconds to start up was. I told him that when I was a kid, I would start my computer, EAT A FULL BREAKFAST, and then hope that Windows 98 was done booting. Often time, it was not.
I went to my grandmother's house because she had a 1991 Mac with all of the learning games. She was technologically proficient for her age. Loading times were fairly quick. Didn't have a computer in my own home until 2001 with Xp
I had HDD boot drive until 2021, and changed to SSD because it used to take 5-10 minutes for the PC to be usable (when I did a fresh install on an HDD around 5-6 years ago, it used to take 2-3 minutes to be ready for usage).
one of my friends had a HDD for like 5 years. about 2 years ago, some of his friends were so fed up with him taking forever to get on his computer to play, that they pooled money together to get him a pretty nice SSD. it took up until about last year until he moved his OS over since he figured that would take a while. now he's slightly mad at himself for not switching over sooner. my brother's old computer had an HDD and it took a good 5 min just to boot into windows, then another 8 min to actually load everything to a clickable state, he would watch TV while that was going on and skipping commercials, would sometimes finish a whole episode before the computer was usable. the computer has since stopped working and it would be more trouble than it's worth to figure out what's wrong with it, he used it for a solid 8-10 ish years. I don't know how he lived like that. He just got a new one and moved everything and it's so much faster. I bought mine with a SATA SSD already in it so I didn't have any of that and I am glad. TLDR: get an SSD if you don't already have one, even a 512GB SATA one at $50-$60 will be well worth it.
I am one of those people who always has HDDs in my rig. I never use them for programs or games anymore, I keep them simply for cheap file storage. Over the years I've accumulated a metric sh!t ton of documents, videos, images, and audio files - those all go on the HDDs.
I wish I seen this video last year. I did a full upgrade to my rig. Went from a 5600x to a 5800x3d, A320 to B550 and 16gb to 32gb of ram. After getting everything installed, I was still experiencing the same load times for boots. Upgraded from a SSD to 980 pro nvme. Couldn’t believe what I was seeing in load times, just off of the updated drive. While I don’t regret upgrading what I did to my rig, I wish I would have known the difference. Great video Greg. Happy holidays everyone!
I remember when I started a new possition (IT Tech/Admin) 4 years ago. Since old IT guy didn't left much documentation about the inventory, that was my first thing to check across the whole company (60-70 PCs, few servers ect.) Design team was using older Dell Precision T1500 workstations for CAD work. Those Dells felt really sluggish, so I checked the state of the drives and imagine my surprise that whole team's PCs had HDDs in them. They told me, that they come to work, turn PCs on and go make coffee. Record breaker took 12 minutes to boot, because HDD was failing and one of the RAM stick was being disabled, that made the PC run full RAM test every time. One of my first purchases was a set of SSDs (no M.2 slots on T1500) and upgrading all of the workstations. People on the team were amazed that those old workstations can run so fast. 6 months later they got brand new, modern PCs with fast NVMe drives.
SSD for boot drives and game library drives today. HDDs for archival, warm to cold storage and media files that don't change that much. That's what I use them for.
My nephew currently has a PC with an HDD, and he says it's sooooo slow. We are updating his PC over Xmas and gonna install an M.2 drive. He will be so happy as it will be so much quicker for him.
It isn't just load times affected in games. Depending on the game of course, things like big texture files or other objects being loaded in can be painful on a hard drive.
I found Mum's old laptop that was about 12 almost roughly 13 years old. I immediately upgraded to a 256 GB SSD that I had lying about and spent about £5 on a 4 GB stick of RAM (8 GB in total) and this system runs great for such an old machine. Sure it won't run games but being able to load programs like Word on it is great. So for anyone who has an old system lying about or a laptop that's running slow. Swapping to an SSD is such a game-changer.
I ended up forcing my room-mate to upgrade from a spinning disk for his OS by giving him a 1tb SSD!! This was a few years back. He recently got a few m.2's and gave me back that SSD, so I put it in my ps3!! And when I had a ps4, I upgraded the storage to a SSD as well and it makes such a difference!! Specially since those consoles with 5400 hdd instead of 7200 hhd's (edited a spelling error)
I mentioned this in response to your X post on this video - I've done this very migration on maybe a half-dozen friend and family laptops and the change is like a new system. Its just reflective of how much worthless bloatware is just baked into Windows (Windoze?) these days. Migration if an existing system is easy with a bootable Linux USB distro that does exact volume copies or a dedicated SATA deck that can copy offline. Totally worth the time and effort.
I completely agree that HDD's are now better suited for storage and not usage. Use them for system backups and storage of huge files. I use an HDD for my backups and installation files. I will also use them to store huge audio or video files. I use M.2's and SSD's for usage in the OS and applications.
I have 1x500GB NVM for OS and games, 2xSSD 240GB + 500GB for games, 4xHDD 300GB + 1TB + 2TB + 3TB for backup storage (NVM + SSD in PC, HDDs external with Disk dock ), thanks for fantastic video Greg.👍❤💯
I upgraded from a HDD to a SATA SSD last year and it really does make a difference. Just the boot alone is almost instant, but opening programs like photoshop is so much better than on the HDD. I did keep the HDD in the PC as a storage drive for my music, but everything else is on the SSD. The drop in price was my biggest reason for making the jump, and I just wish I had done it sooner.
My friend was so excited to play Armored Core 6 and Baldur's gate 3 last year that he never realized he only had an HDD and wondered why the games were running so poorly this is the exact solution to his problem he needed.
I used to be super patient with computers when I was a teenager (my first laptop was 2010 when I had a hand me down Thinkpad X31), discovering the wonders of a SSD has definitely made me less patient with computers nowadays
It is AMAZING how much of a difference an SSD makes. I have a video on my channel with a before and after of upgrading my PS4 from HDD to SSD and even I was shocked at how fast it was after.
While the framerate readout might not look any different between a game running on an SSD vs HDD, I'd still discourage people from playing current gen games on HDDs because things like texture and asset streaming are still affected. If you need a visual of what that might look like then seek out some Cyberpunk 2077 initial release footage on PS4.
The best use of a HDD is capacity. It also has the lowest cost per terabyte. What is large capacity good for? Media files large archives are where they shine. If you have lots of large files that don't benefit from the read speeds of SSD's, the HDD is the way to go. Put your OS on an SSD. Put your games on an SSD. Your movies, music, photos and any other large files can go on OSR (old spinning rust) drives.
My current setup consists of a 128gb Teamgroup SSD for boot, and a 1TB Toshiba HDD for storage and some games. Now I understand why Dota 2 loads longer than usual. Thanks for this video!
Games which dynamically load stuff like textures, assets, and in-game regions tend to stutter when loading from a hard drive, a game not being on an SSD can affect the game performance, especially the 1% and 0.1% lows.
Hilarious beginning Greg! The hdd are so darn slow, the ssd has spoiled us all 😂 I had an older dell xps 8900, it came with a 2tb hdd if I recall. It would take forever to boot as well. I added an nvme ssd which made a massive difference. I also added an evga 1070 gpu and a much better air cooler and also added xtra fans for better cooling. It was my first venture into modding and building pc's! Happy holidays to u and your family!
This takes me back to the time when I had a Windows 10 system which used a hard drive as its primary boot drive. Yeah, that was... rough. SSDs have been an absolute godsend.
I am about to retire my current EVGA 970 i7 3770k build. I switched to an SSD back in 2011 and it was a game changer for speed. Never looked back. Only soon to be a secondary back of an external SSD
most people don't value the importance of great storage this explain the miles a part speed performance of an disk drive and a NVME... why the summer hair cut though put me a bit off but other than that a great informative video Greg. Happy holidays to you and you're beautiful family.
This is why I took the opportunity to swap my old spinning rust 8TB mass storage drive for an SN850X during the black friday week. I saw transfers of up to 2 GB/S once everything was off my HDD. ...I also took the opportunity to add second 8TB SN850X as an additional storage drive, replace my aging 2TB Corsair MP600 with a 4TB SN850X version, and another 4TB as a game drive.
The hard disk in my brother-in-law's 8-year-old PC was defective. He didn't want to upgrade because he only uses it for the internet - “It's easily good enough for that.”. I still had an old 250GB SATA SSD lying around and installed it for him. His comment afterwards: “Ok, now you can really say ‘I'll quickly switch on the PC’.”
Nearly 4 years ago, I decided to buy an SDD for my Grandparents' computer because of how ridiculously slow it was. I chose a Crucial BX500 120GB. I replaced it for the HDD and I also did I clean installation of windows 10. It was a world of difference! The lag had completely disappeared, and much more pleasant to use afterwards. It really helps save some of your time. Anyhow, the 120GB capacity was enough since it was used for the windows installation. The HDD was moved as the secondary storage, so it's definitely worth considering. It only cost $19 USD so it's not like you're breaking the bank or anything.
I haven't booted from a HDD since 2010. It was an adjustment period, getting used to not being able to make a cup of coffee and do other stuff before the PC was ready.
Where would you suggest backing things up? I had an HDD that ran at least 15 years. It made all kinds of weird noises and I had to pound on it once in a while because it was making so much noise. I think it might have been indestructible because I can't tell you how many times I knocked the computer off the desk while it was running. I still have that old HDD, which is just a show of something that was really tough. I really liked this video.
Honestly Greg, the gpu doesn't even matter in this case. Its all that crappy storage. I love you making us sit there waiting with you. It was a great way to prove a point.
I had a Motion Computing tablet with a core solo 1.2 and a 4200rpm Zif drive, Windows XP was impossible to use on it. Found a 60gb Zif SSD and happy days. Great video.
Hello there indeed. And i have to say, this was quite an experience to wait for the pc to boot on a hdd. Never had a hdd for boot before xD Looking forward to the next video :)
@bretthibbs6083 that's good, this is my second wd blue drive, first was last year a 2 tb hard drive, still serves me well for games that don't need fast storage but gonna one day replace it with a SATA SSD. They make very good products for the money.
It is true everytime I'd get an older iMac or MacBook Pro, first thing I'd do was put an SSD, 2010-2013 ones specially, my favorites, makes things so much different. When it comes to PC's they always come with SSD's nowadays.
Good look, man! Also: yes. SSDs are awesome. Even on vintage systems - I mean early 16 bit systems like Amigas and older macs. CF adapters are such a boon to them. Also also, when I got my first m.2 system...man, it was night and day. It was like booting up my C64 back in the day!
These days, the only time i buy/use HDD's is for mass storage, and i don't buy anything under 20TB drives for spinning storage. (if you look around you can get re-certified 20TB drives for $250)
Yea, we need a Micro Center in the bay area again. There was one and then Covid hit, and the closed it. Micro Center we need a store in the Bay Area please!!!!
I remember reading a book in 2007 High school....it was a fiction scifi book that just mentioned how one of the computers booted in seconds and how amazed the person was.... 5 years later I had a laptop with a SSD... lol wild
A long time ago. 2005-2008. Hard drive was critical for multiplayer games because if some one loaded the game before you. They were running around shooting everyone first. So you needed to load first.
I think it really comes down to how often data is used. For example if you have documents you might not look at for years on end, or old digital photos, you can move those to spinning rust, because the data could go years without being used. 1TB SSD's are cheap enough now, that even using a 128GB SSD to boot from, and storing your data on a HDD, no longer makes sense. One place where spinning rust can be useful though, is backups, put a spinning rust drive in your gaming PC, then set up a backup once a week or so, to keep a copy of that SSD on a backup drive, then back that up to the cloud.
1st boot up reminded me of an old w2k server I ran. Interesting enough that wd 7200 drive it used is still running strong as a storage drive on my current build.
Storage can very much have an impact on framerates and frametimes as assets load, you can have really bad stuttering as you move through scenes and assets need to be loaded.
i refurbish older systems for sale and donation, and i do exactly what you recommend. i remove any HDD and replace it with SATA SSD or nvme if possible! great video, great advice! Love your channel Greg, keep up the amazing work! much love from a fellow nerd! ❤ (p.s. the intro is pure gold!)😂
I remember my laptop runs on HDD. And i bought a 128gb m.2. first time after installation of windows feels like its instant. Thats when i realized what ive been missing out
When I was early in my current position one of the first things I did was go through the plant, pull the computers (one at a time!) and clone the spinning rust drives to SSDs. The difference was dramatic, especially because of all the corporate malware... er security software these machines are burdened with. There was one machine, it had a spinning rust drive that had problems and wouldn't clone, it was also our last Windows 7 machine. I rebooted that thing one afternoon and it took a solid HOUR (I timed it). I replaced that computer the next day.
Hard Drives can impact game performance. For example. Someone with an HDD as a boot drive or a console with an HDD could lose the 1st round of Search and Destroy in Call of Duty because they failed to load in while people with an SSD boot drive are already in the game.
greg what your missing is there is an extra draw back to the HDD after u install windows, programs and games on a HDD but u and not a lot of people are probably not aware of this but this what i do and i had to this recently, when u install windows 7, 10, 11 to a HDD with all the drivers, programs and games to the drive they dont clean up the drive using windows utilities that is made for maintenance and this can help load times booting into windows, programs and games. every time i install windows whether its a HDD, 2.5 ssd/m.2 drive i always do a disk clean up, defrag and a check disk through the admin cmd prompt to get all glitches out of the programs and the os, this has improved boot times to get into windows, loading every day programs and games, i do understand games installed on HDD can extended load times but if you defrag the drive and do a check dsk it will run smoother. the reason y it takes longer to load in windows or any other os/program/game is because the files on the drive are fragmented meaning putting barriers on launch to load up so it take longer to load especially games, but me this how i do it and i only install the os and programs to the main boot drive and install games to another drive in the computer whether its a HDD/SSD depending what i have available in my inventory otherwise install to a network drive on my nas or even plug in an external usb drive to the nas and have as additional network drive for games and documents.
Almost didnt even recognize the guy in the thumbnail for a split second. He shall be called "Crew Cut Greg"
His supervisor put her foot down!!!
Temu John Bernthal
That's not a crew cut. That's a short, back and sides.
It's a fade bud, it's a fade..
yap i can see that his barber did him bad xD ...
It is so comical to me that you made us sit with you in real time while it booted off the HDD. 🤣🤣
I think thats why the video is 14:35 min long. its just the boot up from the HDD 😂 and we all watched it.
yeah, I don't know how I managed to survive with a boot drive HDD for so long
maybe something to do with Windows 7 being lighter, but still it took a few minutes to fully boot
True, but 2 or so minutes is also not that bad.
My daughter just inherited my niece's old laptop. It's about a 12 year old Compaq. A few days ago, I swapped the HDD for an SSD. It does make a huge difference. I had done the same for my laptop several years ago. It was honestly like a brand new computer. It's really one of the cheapest, easiest upgrades you can do for an older system.
My 20 year old coworker was talking about how slow a computer that took about 50 seconds to start up was. I told him that when I was a kid, I would start my computer, EAT A FULL BREAKFAST, and then hope that Windows 98 was done booting. Often time, it was not.
I went to my grandmother's house because she had a 1991 Mac with all of the learning games. She was technologically proficient for her age. Loading times were fairly quick. Didn't have a computer in my own home until 2001 with Xp
I remember 1hr loading tape drives on the commodore plus 4.
@@brokeandtired Yeah, me too.
@@brokeandtired yeh them days were brutal
I had HDD boot drive until 2021, and changed to SSD because it used to take 5-10 minutes for the PC to be usable (when I did a fresh install on an HDD around 5-6 years ago, it used to take 2-3 minutes to be ready for usage).
one of my friends had a HDD for like 5 years. about 2 years ago, some of his friends were so fed up with him taking forever to get on his computer to play, that they pooled money together to get him a pretty nice SSD. it took up until about last year until he moved his OS over since he figured that would take a while. now he's slightly mad at himself for not switching over sooner.
my brother's old computer had an HDD and it took a good 5 min just to boot into windows, then another 8 min to actually load everything to a clickable state, he would watch TV while that was going on and skipping commercials, would sometimes finish a whole episode before the computer was usable. the computer has since stopped working and it would be more trouble than it's worth to figure out what's wrong with it, he used it for a solid 8-10 ish years. I don't know how he lived like that. He just got a new one and moved everything and it's so much faster.
I bought mine with a SATA SSD already in it so I didn't have any of that and I am glad.
TLDR: get an SSD if you don't already have one, even a 512GB SATA one at $50-$60 will be well worth it.
I remember those days. Used to go make myself some coffee while the computer booted.
I was going to say the same. Turn on, go make coffee.
How to extend a YT video, boot up an old HDD.
I am one of those people who always has HDDs in my rig. I never use them for programs or games anymore, I keep them simply for cheap file storage. Over the years I've accumulated a metric sh!t ton of documents, videos, images, and audio files - those all go on the HDDs.
Same, I have a HDD in my PC to use as a PRE backup of what I DL, before moving to external HDD's.
I’ve upgrade several old computers for my coworkers at work with SSDs and they are amazed at the difference lol.
It is like night and day difference on older PCs.
Pretty wild this has to be said in 2024. This was obvious as early as the early 2010s
I wish I seen this video last year. I did a full upgrade to my rig. Went from a 5600x to a 5800x3d, A320 to B550 and 16gb to 32gb of ram. After getting everything installed, I was still experiencing the same load times for boots. Upgraded from a SSD to 980 pro nvme. Couldn’t believe what I was seeing in load times, just off of the updated drive. While I don’t regret upgrading what I did to my rig, I wish I would have known the difference. Great video Greg. Happy holidays everyone!
I remember when I started a new possition (IT Tech/Admin) 4 years ago. Since old IT guy didn't left much documentation about the inventory, that was my first thing to check across the whole company (60-70 PCs, few servers ect.)
Design team was using older Dell Precision T1500 workstations for CAD work. Those Dells felt really sluggish, so I checked the state of the drives and imagine my surprise that whole team's PCs had HDDs in them. They told me, that they come to work, turn PCs on and go make coffee. Record breaker took 12 minutes to boot, because HDD was failing and one of the RAM stick was being disabled, that made the PC run full RAM test every time.
One of my first purchases was a set of SSDs (no M.2 slots on T1500) and upgrading all of the workstations. People on the team were amazed that those old workstations can run so fast. 6 months later they got brand new, modern PCs with fast NVMe drives.
I did my laundry while this PC started
I thought this was already settled but this refresher was illuminating anyway. Good job sir.
I just liquid cooled mine with Red Bull
Bet it's flying now!
Best way for growing aliens and create corrosion. 👏 Who knows what the hell are there inside.
Gonna need another haircut by the time the PC posts
Just took my old HP elitedesk tower, fresh win 10 and pc games on a ssd, 2 hdd for media and emulated games. Great media center.
Greg is the only RUclipsr that I watch that actually responds to my comments. I appreciate you and your videos. Thank you.
Much appreciated! I try my best.
i felt something when we made eye contact
0:58 we are doing fine Greg thank you for asking lol
SSD for boot drives and game library drives today.
HDDs for archival, warm to cold storage and media files that don't change that much.
That's what I use them for.
I have a 4TB nvme just for games, lol, good enough for probably 4 games ;p
My nephew currently has a PC with an HDD, and he says it's sooooo slow. We are updating his PC over Xmas and gonna install an M.2 drive. He will be so happy as it will be so much quicker for him.
looking sharp, greg! love the new hairdo. keep up the great content 🫶🏼
I boiled the kettle.....made a drink....and actually drunk it before the HDD PC loaded
The last personal system I built with a HDD for boot was 2008. It was quickly replaced in 2009 by an 80GB Intel X25-M and haven't looked back since.
Wort wort wort!
It isn't just load times affected in games. Depending on the game of course, things like big texture files or other objects being loaded in can be painful on a hard drive.
I found Mum's old laptop that was about 12 almost roughly 13 years old. I immediately upgraded to a 256 GB SSD that I had lying about and spent about £5 on a 4 GB stick of RAM (8 GB in total) and this system runs great for such an old machine. Sure it won't run games but being able to load programs like Word on it is great. So for anyone who has an old system lying about or a laptop that's running slow. Swapping to an SSD is such a game-changer.
As someone who put a sata ssd in my old rig for my son yesterday I felt that intro all the way in my soul lol.
Even with the diminishing returns, just the fact that NVME gets rid of cables in your rig is worth the extra $20+.
This is true :-D
I ended up forcing my room-mate to upgrade from a spinning disk for his OS by giving him a 1tb SSD!! This was a few years back. He recently got a few m.2's and gave me back that SSD, so I put it in my ps3!! And when I had a ps4, I upgraded the storage to a SSD as well and it makes such a difference!! Specially since those consoles with 5400 hdd instead of 7200 hhd's (edited a spelling error)
I mentioned this in response to your X post on this video - I've done this very migration on maybe a half-dozen friend and family laptops and the change is like a new system. Its just reflective of how much worthless bloatware is just baked into Windows (Windoze?) these days. Migration if an existing system is easy with a bootable Linux USB distro that does exact volume copies or a dedicated SATA deck that can copy offline. Totally worth the time and effort.
I completely agree that HDD's are now better suited for storage and not usage. Use them for system backups and storage of huge files. I use an HDD for my backups and installation files. I will also use them to store huge audio or video files. I use M.2's and SSD's for usage in the OS and applications.
I have 1x500GB NVM for OS and games, 2xSSD 240GB + 500GB for games, 4xHDD 300GB + 1TB + 2TB + 3TB for backup storage (NVM + SSD in PC, HDDs external with Disk dock ), thanks for fantastic video Greg.👍❤💯
Hello everyone. Keep up the good work Greg
I upgraded from a HDD to a SATA SSD last year and it really does make a difference. Just the boot alone is almost instant, but opening programs like photoshop is so much better than on the HDD.
I did keep the HDD in the PC as a storage drive for my music, but everything else is on the SSD.
The drop in price was my biggest reason for making the jump, and I just wish I had done it sooner.
I really like Greg smiling while looking on NZXT boot logo😂
My general rule with storage for a while has been to use HDDs for backups/NAS and SSDs for everything else. The fastest SSD gets used as a boot drive.
My friend was so excited to play Armored Core 6 and Baldur's gate 3 last year that he never realized he only had an HDD and wondered why the games were running so poorly
this is the exact solution to his problem he needed.
I used to be super patient with computers when I was a teenager (my first laptop was 2010 when I had a hand me down Thinkpad X31), discovering the wonders of a SSD has definitely made me less patient with computers nowadays
It is AMAZING how much of a difference an SSD makes. I have a video on my channel with a before and after of upgrading my PS4 from HDD to SSD and even I was shocked at how fast it was after.
thank you so much for giving me back a piece of my childhood again.
I still use newer hdd drives for storage. I didnt use 2.5ssds long before I switch to nvme drives to boot.
Im glad you showed this off.
While the framerate readout might not look any different between a game running on an SSD vs HDD, I'd still discourage people from playing current gen games on HDDs because things like texture and asset streaming are still affected. If you need a visual of what that might look like then seek out some Cyberpunk 2077 initial release footage on PS4.
It’s always a good time when my boy Greg’s on the scene
The best use of a HDD is capacity. It also has the lowest cost per terabyte. What is large capacity good for? Media files large archives are where they shine. If you have lots of large files that don't benefit from the read speeds of SSD's, the HDD is the way to go. Put your OS on an SSD. Put your games on an SSD. Your movies, music, photos and any other large files can go on OSR (old spinning rust) drives.
Always appriciate the content :) Always remember patience is the key.
My current setup consists of a 128gb Teamgroup SSD for boot, and a 1TB Toshiba HDD for storage and some games. Now I understand why Dota 2 loads longer than usual. Thanks for this video!
Games which dynamically load stuff like textures, assets, and in-game regions tend to stutter when loading from a hard drive, a game not being on an SSD can affect the game performance, especially the 1% and 0.1% lows.
We discussed this in the video already. If files are being pulled from the hard drive concurrent with in-game demand, you'll see stuttering.
Hilarious beginning Greg! The hdd are so darn slow, the ssd has spoiled us all 😂 I had an older dell xps 8900, it came with a 2tb hdd if I recall. It would take forever to boot as well. I added an nvme ssd which made a massive difference. I also added an evga 1070 gpu and a much better air cooler and also added xtra fans for better cooling. It was my first venture into modding and building pc's! Happy holidays to u and your family!
Dude you crack me up lol. The look in the beginning waiting for the pc to start 😂😂
This takes me back to the time when I had a Windows 10 system which used a hard drive as its primary boot drive.
Yeah, that was... rough. SSDs have been an absolute godsend.
I am about to retire my current EVGA 970 i7 3770k build. I switched to an SSD back in 2011 and it was a game changer for speed. Never looked back. Only soon to be a secondary back of an external SSD
most people don't value the importance of great storage this explain the miles a part speed performance of an disk drive and a NVME... why the summer hair cut though put me a bit off but other than that a great informative video Greg. Happy holidays to you and you're beautiful family.
This is why I took the opportunity to swap my old spinning rust 8TB mass storage drive for an SN850X during the black friday week. I saw transfers of up to 2 GB/S once everything was off my HDD.
...I also took the opportunity to add second 8TB SN850X as an additional storage drive, replace my aging 2TB Corsair MP600 with a 4TB SN850X version, and another 4TB as a game drive.
Love the videos greg!
The hard disk in my brother-in-law's 8-year-old PC was defective. He didn't want to upgrade because he only uses it for the internet - “It's easily good enough for that.”. I still had an old 250GB SATA SSD lying around and installed it for him. His comment afterwards: “Ok, now you can really say ‘I'll quickly switch on the PC’.”
Clean cut Greg looking good
Nearly 4 years ago, I decided to buy an SDD for my Grandparents' computer because of how ridiculously slow it was. I chose a Crucial BX500 120GB. I replaced it for the HDD and I also did I clean installation of windows 10. It was a world of difference! The lag had completely disappeared, and much more pleasant to use afterwards. It really helps save some of your time. Anyhow, the 120GB capacity was enough since it was used for the windows installation. The HDD was moved as the secondary storage, so it's definitely worth considering. It only cost $19 USD so it's not like you're breaking the bank or anything.
This is my exact circumstances im booting off that exact 1tb HDD and have been contemplating a m.2, this confirms how much of a difference itll make
I haven't booted from a HDD since 2010. It was an adjustment period, getting used to not being able to make a cup of coffee and do other stuff before the PC was ready.
I have 2 8TB WD BLue HDD's still, those are great for movies and shows.
Where would you suggest backing things up?
I had an HDD that ran at least 15 years. It made all kinds of weird noises and I had to pound on it once in a while because it was making so much noise. I think it might have been indestructible because I can't tell you how many times I knocked the computer off the desk while it was running. I still have that old HDD, which is just a show of something that was really tough.
I really liked this video.
Ooooh, boy! This is going to be a loooooooong podcast, even my 3.5 inch hard drive is NOT that slow.
Honestly Greg, the gpu doesn't even matter in this case. Its all that crappy storage. I love you making us sit there waiting with you. It was a great way to prove a point.
I had a Motion Computing tablet with a core solo 1.2 and a 4200rpm Zif drive, Windows XP was impossible to use on it. Found a 60gb Zif SSD and happy days. Great video.
Nice trim!
Replacing ssd and adding rams are 2 of the best and easiest upgrades to a computer.
Great opening 😁
In Australia the cost is about 2.5-3x the times, but your talking around $30 vs $80
This
Hello there indeed.
And i have to say, this was quite an experience to wait for the pc to boot on a hdd.
Never had a hdd for boot before xD
Looking forward to the next video :)
just got that same wd blue nvme last month, sure is an amazing drive especially for the price !
I've been using wd blue for close to 20 years now and I love them both hdd and ssd drives and knock on wood I've had really good luck with them.
@bretthibbs6083 that's good, this is my second wd blue drive, first was last year a 2 tb hard drive, still serves me well for games that don't need fast storage but gonna one day replace it with a SATA SSD. They make very good products for the money.
Would you have bought it if it retained the old name of Sandisk?
Imagine thinking Western Digital makes SSDs, they are an OEM rebrand of Sandisk
@@johnt.848 didn't know that, but yeah. I've had a 64 GB SanDisk flash drive for over a decade that somehow still works 😂
I can't help but to think Greg took a subtle .22 caliber sized shot at NZXT here lol
It is true everytime I'd get an older iMac or MacBook Pro, first thing I'd do was put an SSD, 2010-2013 ones specially, my favorites, makes things so much different. When it comes to PC's they always come with SSD's nowadays.
I've completely moved on from HDDs in my daily driver. Instead I moved all of them to an Unraid rig. Having a NAS is another huge QoL upgrade.
Good look, man! Also: yes. SSDs are awesome. Even on vintage systems - I mean early 16 bit systems like Amigas and older macs. CF adapters are such a boon to them. Also also, when I got my first m.2 system...man, it was night and day. It was like booting up my C64 back in the day!
more RAM and an SSD
these two upgrades will make a big difference
These days, the only time i buy/use HDD's is for mass storage, and i don't buy anything under 20TB drives for spinning storage. (if you look around you can get re-certified 20TB drives for $250)
Lmao something about the awkward silence and that smile as the PC takes decades to boot up had me dying laughing 😂 SSD is must have
Seems right proud of the fact that he's got a hdd taking ages to load.
Yea, we need a Micro Center in the bay area again. There was one and then Covid hit, and the closed it. Micro Center we need a store in the Bay Area please!!!!
I remember reading a book in 2007 High school....it was a fiction scifi book that just mentioned how one of the computers booted in seconds and how amazed the person was.... 5 years later I had a laptop with a SSD... lol wild
Nice Cut G!
Love these videos. .
I appreciate it!
0:17 The face of relief after finally finishing up the install of Windows 11 on a hard drive.
0:00 “hello there”
-Obi Wan Kenobi
A long time ago. 2005-2008. Hard drive was critical for multiplayer games because if some one loaded the game before you. They were running around shooting everyone first. So you needed to load first.
I remember my first SSD, I used to open Adobe Photoshop over and over because I couldn't believe how quickly it launched.
I think it really comes down to how often data is used. For example if you have documents you might not look at for years on end, or old digital photos, you can move those to spinning rust, because the data could go years without being used. 1TB SSD's are cheap enough now, that even using a 128GB SSD to boot from, and storing your data on a HDD, no longer makes sense.
One place where spinning rust can be useful though, is backups, put a spinning rust drive in your gaming PC, then set up a backup once a week or so, to keep a copy of that SSD on a backup drive, then back that up to the cloud.
1st boot up reminded me of an old w2k server I ran. Interesting enough that wd 7200 drive it used is still running strong as a storage drive on my current build.
I laughed at that intro way harder than I should have 😂
Imagine being a gta speedrunner with a hdd and getting a WR. That must be a the best feeling ever lol
Storage can very much have an impact on framerates and frametimes as assets load, you can have really bad stuttering as you move through scenes and assets need to be loaded.
i refurbish older systems for sale and donation, and i do exactly what you recommend. i remove any HDD and replace it with SATA SSD or nvme if possible! great video, great advice! Love your channel Greg, keep up the amazing work! much love from a fellow nerd! ❤ (p.s. the intro is pure gold!)😂
I remember 15-to-25-minute boots being fast. The closet Microcenter to me is soon to be about 8 hours away. That is when the Florida location opens.
FL location is already open, my friend.
@@GregSalazar Cool I am going to Microcenter.
At least half of the computers that come to me are like that! I tray to talk the clients into upgrades.
I remember my laptop runs on HDD. And i bought a 128gb m.2. first time after installation of windows feels like its instant. Thats when i realized what ive been missing out
When I was early in my current position one of the first things I did was go through the plant, pull the computers (one at a time!) and clone the spinning rust drives to SSDs. The difference was dramatic, especially because of all the corporate malware... er security software these machines are burdened with.
There was one machine, it had a spinning rust drive that had problems and wouldn't clone, it was also our last Windows 7 machine. I rebooted that thing one afternoon and it took a solid HOUR (I timed it). I replaced that computer the next day.
Hard Drives can impact game performance. For example. Someone with an HDD as a boot drive or a console with an HDD could lose the 1st round of Search and Destroy in Call of Duty because they failed to load in while people with an SSD boot drive are already in the game.
2 minutes is not the worst, last time I worked on a hdd system was when it took 10 minutes. I was diagnosing BSOD. I was literally dying at the end
greg what your missing is there is an extra draw back to the HDD after u install windows, programs and games on a HDD but u and not a lot of people are probably not aware of this but this what i do and i had to this recently, when u install windows 7, 10, 11 to a HDD with all the drivers, programs and games to the drive they dont clean up the drive using windows utilities that is made for maintenance and this can help load times booting into windows, programs and games.
every time i install windows whether its a HDD, 2.5 ssd/m.2 drive i always do a disk clean up, defrag and a check disk through the admin cmd prompt to get all glitches out of the programs and the os, this has improved boot times to get into windows, loading every day programs and games, i do understand games installed on HDD can extended load times but if you defrag the drive and do a check dsk it will run smoother.
the reason y it takes longer to load in windows or any other os/program/game is because the files on the drive are fragmented meaning putting barriers on launch to load up so it take longer to load especially games, but me this how i do it and i only install the os and programs to the main boot drive and install games to another drive in the computer whether its a HDD/SSD depending what i have available in my inventory otherwise install to a network drive on my nas or even plug in an external usb drive to the nas and have as additional network drive for games and documents.