Slow computer, suggestions?

[Fatbat]

1TB solid state drive to replace this one.

This is completely unnecessary and more money than you need to spend.

As was previously alluded to, get a good Intel or Samsung 240gb SSD for your OS and programs, and then get a matching pair of 1-3 TB drives to put into RAID or mirrored drives for your work and resources files. If you're doing a lot of Photoshop work or audio/video editing consider another drive, perhaps a 60gb SSD, for your scratch/buffer disk.

It's never a good idea to keep your work and resources files on your main drive, it causes fragmentation and slows shit down. Plus if that drive dies you lose everything. This way makes it easy if you ever need to reformat or roll back the main drive in the future and your important shit is backed up redundantly on separate storage.

Set your shit up like this and I guarantee you'll be a lot happier.

 

[-joe-]

I wouldn't put anything too critical on an SSD, unless you're performing daily backups - harder to recover data from, and more temperamental. OS should be fine though. Had my OCZ 240GB SSD die within 3 months of buying it.

 

[igl00]

buy new one, seems u got crap!
SSD for system rocks btw.
my comp is now 2 years old and stil lan have liek 3-4 bigass games on tabs without loosing any speed.

 

[Fatbat]

I wouldn't put anything too critical on an SSD, unless you're performing daily backups - harder to recover data from, and more temperamental. OS should be fine though. Had my OCZ 240GB SSD die within 3 months of buying it.

How recently? SSD is rock solid these days but, as with any PC hardware, shit can go wrong. I've had regular HDDs die within a month of buying them too. That being said, the setup I outlined above doesn't store precious files on the SSDs. They are just for OS, programs and scratch/buffer.

 

[cheshire]

I wouldn't put anything too critical on an SSD, unless you're performing daily backups - harder to recover data from, and more temperamental. OS should be fine though. Had my OCZ 240GB SSD die within 3 months of buying it.

OCZ is your problem there. Get a good brand like Samsung or Intel. I have a 32GB Intel SSD, one of the first ones they released and it still runs like a champ. It's about 4 years old now.

 

[HeadStartSEO]

SSD and I agree OCZ isn't the best.

 

[contract]

I literally just made a thread on this a few months ago..

Same situation.

No viruses.
Removed extra files.
Removed all programs.
CCleaner.
Windows Cleanup.
Defrag.
Msconfig (edited everything)

etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

And still nothing, it was still slow..

?

Not sure why Windows has that issue over time...

....

Ended up buying a brand new laptop, otherwise I'd just reformat it. Works 100% of time. Reformat > SSD, more ram, etc.

Here's what you should do though. Buy a new SSD, install a fresh copy of windows and you're set.

 

[microphone head]

I'm quite surprised none of you have snapshots of your system the moment you've got yuor fresh install working perfectly as you want.

Ghost it back over any time you're not happy with it running like shit. Takes about 10 mins. Simples.

 

[-joe-]

How recently? SSD is rock solid these days but, as with any PC hardware, shit can go wrong. I've had regular HDDs die within a month of buying them too. That being said, the setup I outlined above doesn't store precious files on the SSDs. They are just for OS, programs and scratch/buffer.

Not a huge amount of time, last September. Still got it sitting around, I meant to return it but never got round to it. Yeah, sounds like a plan, luckily I only had BF3 on mine, I hadn't installed Windows on it yet.

OCZ is your problem there. Get a good brand like Samsung or Intel. I have a 32GB Intel SSD, one of the first ones they released and it still runs like a champ. It's about 4 years old now.

Yeah, I might splash out and get one. OCZ are normally decent, both my RAM and PSU were made by them for a few years, and had no problems.

 

[BrynYoungblut]

 

[SideGeek]

I set up my OS and regular software on a 256 GB SSD and my files on my regular seagate. Works like a charm. If you are investing on a new HDD, then this is the way to go. I don't think a 1TB of SSD would be necessary as it will cost a BOMB. If not, a clean install of the OS would be enough.

The processor could cause this sometimes as well though. The last time i faced a situation like this, it turned out to be the processor.

 

[nickCR]

Not sure if SATA2 or SATA3. This is my mobo: ASUS Crosshair V Formula AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Gaming Motherboard with 3-Way SLI/CrossFireX Support and UEFI BIOS - Newegg.com

Yes that is SATA3. Sata 2 was only 3Gb/s.

So buy a SSD (240GB will do) and use your HDD as a storage drive only. I like having my SSD on Sata port 0. But you can configure what boots from the bios. Nice and easy with UEFI BIOS. Two options you can get right now are the Intel 520 and Samsung 840 PRO. Both are very high in performance.

If you really want to see some spiffy performance gains, buy 2 or 4 of the same drive (1 TB /each) put them in RAID3 or RAID5 and use that as your storage drive, with an SSD as your main drive your good.

The important thing to remember is that your SSD is really only for installing apps, all your stored files like pics, videos, games, should go on your HDD.

If you did setup the raid use your existing drive as an external or internal backup only drive. You can get a nice USB3.0 hot swap Sata Dock and use that for your backup drive.

Seriously though the SSD will be like putting your machine on roids. You'll be installing a fresh OS on the SSD so it will be blazing.

 

[dmnEPC]

Yes that is SATA3. Sata 2 was only 3Gb/s.

So buy a SSD (240GB will do) and use your HDD as a storage drive only. I like having my SSD on Sata port 0. But you can configure what boots from the bios. Nice and easy with UEFI BIOS. Two options you can get right now are the Intel 520 and Samsung 840 PRO. Both are very high in performance.

If you really want to see some spiffy performance gains, buy 2 or 4 of the same drive (1 TB /each) put them in RAID3 or RAID5 and use that as your storage drive, with an SSD as your main drive your good.

The important thing to remember is that your SSD is really only for installing apps, all your stored files like pics, videos, games, should go on your HDD.

If you did setup the raid use your existing drive as an external or internal backup only drive. You can get a nice USB3.0 hot swap Sata Dock and use that for your backup drive.

Seriously though the SSD will be like putting your machine on roids. You'll be installing a fresh OS on the SSD so it will be blazing.

QFT!

Setting up a raid is something I have yet to attempt, but long considered. Have you had any stability issues? How was the ease of the setup?

 

[nickCR]

QFT!

Setting up a raid is something I have yet to attempt, but long considered. Have you had any stability issues? How was the ease of the setup?

No problems at all and going on 3 years. I just use the Intel Raid tool. It has rebuilt a few times to fix little issues. 4 500GB barracuda drives in RAID5 (1.34Gb).

The green drives are ok to use for backup devices but I don't suggest them for your everyday drives. All drives have a lifespan. Green tend to be a lot less if they are being used a lot. In a NAS they are dormant most of the time so it's not a big deal.

Also keeping good ventilation in your case will help with HDD lifespan.

 

[HiGhPeR]

Yes that is SATA3. Sata 2 was only 3Gb/s.

So buy a SSD (240GB will do) and use your HDD as a storage drive only. I like having my SSD on Sata port 0. But you can configure what boots from the bios. Nice and easy with UEFI BIOS. Two options you can get right now are the Intel 520 and Samsung 840 PRO. Both are very high in performance.

If you really want to see some spiffy performance gains, buy 2 or 4 of the same drive (1 TB /each) put them in RAID3 or RAID5 and use that as your storage drive, with an SSD as your main drive your good.

The important thing to remember is that your SSD is really only for installing apps, all your stored files like pics, videos, games, should go on your HDD.

If you did setup the raid use your existing drive as an external or internal backup only drive. You can get a nice USB3.0 hot swap Sata Dock and use that for your backup drive.

Seriously though the SSD will be like putting your machine on roids. You'll be installing a fresh OS on the SSD so it will be blazing.

You're so smart, Nick.

 

[dmnEPC]

No problems at all and going on 3 years. I just use the Intel Raid tool. It has rebuilt a few times to fix little issues. 4 500GB barracuda drives in RAID5 (1.34Gb).

The green drives are ok to use for backup devices but I don't suggest them for your everyday drives. All drives have a lifespan. Green tend to be a lot less if they are being used a lot. In a NAS they are dormant most of the time so it's not a big deal.

Also keeping good ventilation in your case will help with HDD lifespan.

agreed. I wont use the green drives (stick w/ black) at all. Heard way to many problems. I leave the side of my case open full time so doubt ventilation will be a problem. One more question on the Raid, is it critical the drives be identical?

 

[nickCR]

agreed. I wont use the green drives (stick w/ black) at all. Heard way to many problems. I leave the side of my case open full time so doubt ventilation will be a problem. One more question on the Raid, is it critical the drives be identical?

I think it depends on the RAID you setup as some are more fussy than others. There is lots of a variation from drive to drive... buffer ram, read write speed, etc.. Ideally use the same drives.

Having said that you should be able to use drives of the same size from different brands with no stability issues. If there is a small drive then the raid will use that drive size as the max size for the other drives despite their size. There are some RAID's that actually are designed to work with all different sized drives. Think huge drive banks at a data center.. But those are expensive as fuck lol.

 

[Mike]

This is completely unnecessary and more money than you need to spend.

....

It's never a good idea to keep your work and resources files on your main drive, it causes fragmentation and slows shit down. Plus if that drive dies you lose everything.

I like overkill. Serious overkill. 1TB SSD is overkill. Makes me feel better.

Using SmartDefrag. So, no issues ever with fragmentation.

I wouldn't put anything too critical on an SSD, unless you're performing daily backups - harder to recover data from, and more temperamental. OS should be fine though. Had my OCZ 240GB SSD die within 3 months of buying it.

I've had HDDs crash many times. No big deal. Just a little bit of time to re-download programs and data.

All my mission critical data is on the HDD, and I have no less than 2 other backups (3 in some cases). I'm synching to Dropbox upon data change, and also to an external HDD.

GoodSync: File Synchronization Software, File Backup, File Sync <-- FTW

It may not be a RAID setup, but it works, and I'm never concerned about my data being lost.

 

[dmnEPC]

I like overkill. Serious overkill. 1TB SSD is overkill. Makes me feel better.

Using SmartDefrag. So, no issues ever with fragmentation.



I've had HDDs crash many times. No big deal. Just a little bit of time to re-download programs and data.

All my mission critical data is on the HDD, and I have no less than 2 other backups (3 in some cases). I'm synching to Dropbox upon data change, and also to an external HDD.

GoodSync: File Synchronization Software, File Backup, File Sync <-- FTW

It may not be a RAID setup, but it works, and I'm never concerned about my data being lost.

Are you putting secure files on Dropbox? Lack of privacy FTW!!!. Other than cloud, is one of those 2 to 3 backups offsite? Onsite only backup is not backup

 

[I_like_cock]

Just make a fresh new Win admin account. Anytime my PC gets cluttered I do this and its just like a fresh install and I just buy a new desktop every 3-4 years which helps too.