But I remember the days when a hard disk was the bees knees compared to running off of a floppy drive only system - but then I also remember the days when floppy drives were the bees knees compared to loading off of a cassette tape drive...and then I remember the days of how a serial terminal for entering a program was the bees knees compared to a punch card machine - but I don't remember the days of having to toggle the bits into memory from a front panel, so no, I never saw dinosaurs roaming around on the Great Plains - that was before my time
Very funny. But very true. I can relate up to floppy drives only. Back then, basic programs loaded nearly instantaneously from hard drives compared to floppies. Even listing directories and folders with the DIR command took some patience (with floppies), but I also remember being a lot more patient back then. 🙂
Yeah, if I can help it I won't use a spinny disk in anything anymore. I hope that price point on SSDs craters; it's almost at critical mass where it'll hit spinny disk prices, but not quite. You see the delta really take off once you pass the 1tb price. A 1tb SSD is still about 2.7-3.0x the price of a platter drive of same capacity...but up from there, the difference skyrockets. I think a 1.5tb SSD is over $250 US for example at the time of this writing.
Can confirm, built a PC with an SSD boot and HDD games library but eventually replaced the HDD. SSD's are really cheap and hard drives just not worth it if you play games
I use two SSD's 500gb and a 40gb, one for boot, apps, and game, the other for Temp files and Disk Cache (never used). Then I have 8 TB Spinning DIsk storage for video, audio, and photo data. This is the bee's knees IMO.
Interesting video, one small correction though, it's easy to mix up bits and Bytes, but SATA 2 runs at 3 Gb/s (bits) or around 300 MB/s (Bytes). Which is about half that of SATA 3, but twice as fast as SATA 1.
SATA 2 is not really 3 Gb/s, even when it is advertised as that. It is the baud rate, SATA uses 10b/8b coding, means the data rate is 2.4 Gb/s. Saying it is 3 Gb/s is the same as saying 100 Mb/s Ethernet is 125 Mb/s. 10b/8b means that 10 symbols (1 or 0) are send to transmit 8 bits. This is completely independent of the protocol overhead which you have on top of that.
My second pc is a core 2 duo e7300 and get 730(good win 10) 3gb ram (some random reason the motherboard can't accept more) 120gb ssd 320gb only for backup
@@DawidDoesTechStuff I've managed to convert some SATA SSD's to IDE using some old adapters. Couldn't get it to work last time I tried though, either my adapter died or I pulled some wizard magic the time before and now I've lost the touch. But that's reaaaal retro when you're getting back to pre USB and pre SATA days. I'd avoid going that far back, assuming you're old enough to even have used old 66/33/16/8 MHz systems.
@@tonymorris4335 Depending on how retro it is, you can just do an IDE to CF card. Not like really old systems need large amounts of storage anyway. LGR uses a 4 GB CF in his 486 I believe.
@@tonymorris4335 IDE! I remember rounding my IDE cables with a razor blade & zip ties for leet airflow performance. Even did the floppy drive. Floppy drives...... now why didnt the Ls120 take off?????? Backwards compatible, no fuss. Compare that with burning a CD or clunky zip drives. (USB drives werent out yet) I dont get it. wtf ls120!
The biggest upgrade ever to my laptop was installing an m.2 ssd. It came with only a 5200rpm HDD from the factory so it was incredibly slow, even though it has an 8th gen i5 and sufficient memory. Imo it should be made illegal to ship modern computers without an ssd at least as a boot drive.
Things have definitely changed in the last 12 months. Best Buy sells more sub-$500 laptops with SSDs than with HDDs these days. You're often limited to 128GB which isn't great but for most people, it's not going to be an issue.
great video, an SSD can help older systems longevity with windows 10 big time. I did this to a C2Q system that my aunt uses and she didn't believe me when I said I just changed the drive.
I recently upgraded my dads 10 Year old Toshiba Laptop (L350-264) from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and changed the Hard Drive 240GB to an Spare HyperX Savage 500GB SSD I had. This upgrade and update made it a whole new machine
The answer is that hard drive bottlenecks are severe. Even with new HDDs. I have a new-ish laptop that came with a SATA3 5400RPM 1TB HDD and it ran like molasses on a sub freezing day. I cloned that drive to an old SSD that is 500GB and now that laptop flies. It won't game, but it loads Libre Writer in a few seconds instead of minutes.
Thank you for making this video; it does highlight the increasing importance of faster storage, it all adds up when going about day to day operations. Whats great about using SSDs in older builds is despite SATA/IDE limitations what really matters is its IOPS performance, how quickly it can handle a bunch of smaller files. In my first gen pentium 4 (using an sata to ide converter that plugs directly into the motherboard helps); it lowered my boot times of windows 7 from 5 minutes to 1.5; and a minute of that is spent on bios initialization. For myself; any build these days back to the original Pentium gets an ssd; even 486s and prior get sd cards, will never go back to using hard drives for anything but mass storage.
You could get a PCI SATA3 adapter for the old system, probably pretty cheap. That and max the CPU out for like $20. Core2Quad if you can, that should make a huge difference.
When I had to start using Vista, that was because my brand new PC (at that time) had more than 4GB RAM... The reason there was simple: With more than 4 GB of RAM our options were limited to Vista, Windows Server, XP 64 bit, Linux, BSD... But even XP 64bit had different driver model, compatibility issues, etc. so Vista was the reasonable way to go. For most other systems people didn't have to move to Vista, but if you wanted more than 4Gb you had to get Vista. If you had less RAM you were better off with XP, as it offered more compatibility with existing software. Usually people who bought lots of RAM, bought it to avoid RAM being a bottleneck in an "otherwise very strong" system. And people often said, if you fill your mobo with RAM use the biggest capacity DIMMs it will support, it will be helpful later. Those Vista systems often ended up with an upgrade to Q6600, which was a popular CPU and much cheaper then Core 2 Extreme (or even a Q6700). So I feel your old system is a bit underpowered for a proper Vista era PC.
"Look at my horse, the steroids amazin', give it a boot, the load times are blazin', with a click on the drive your PC will fly, and then it will die when you install a spinny, 'Oooh that's pokey.' Mm do you think so? Well I'd better not show you where the SATA port is RAID..." I am both very sorry and on the other hand not at all sorry for this.
@@whyers4782 well, makes sense i mean, w 7 was designed with these as the usual, widespread drives, like win xp was snappy with hdd, however win 10 was meant for ssd, as in 2015 adoption was raising, it also works fine on fast hdd with cache, but on slow, laptop hdds? horrible, it works but.. as tech goes.. i mean try to run w10 with a celeron dual core and 4gb of ram vs win 7...
I've climbed the mountains of bodies of gamers who've died having to wait for Windows to install or games to load.. MOUNTAINS.. upon mountains of our fallen brothers fighting the battle of load times. So sad. :P
LOL back in the MPlayer days I ran as LAGG CREEP!!! because I ran old stuff and I had bad internet... but I was much feared back then, In the Quake room.. You may get me a few times but after that I wiped the floor with most people.. Those was the good old days... Because I was good at predicting what people would do and where they would be at even with bad, what we we call now days latency IE lagg back then.
Thanks for the tips... My dad has an All-in-one PC (Lenovo C200) with a 500 GB HDD, maybe from 2009 or 2010, at the time when "Windows 7" entered at market. I'm thinking on change the HDD and install a 480 GB SSD. So, the Lenovo C200 will work faster with the SSD anyway.
I recently did the same. Changed my WD Blue 5400 for an NVMe 1 TB and I can now restart windows in about 40 seconds. With the hdd just closing down windows 10 took 2 minutes and then another 3+ minutes to start. Not to mention I went from pretty frequent drops in SLOBS ~10% a session on the hdd compared to fewer than 1% with NVMe in a 2 hour stream.
On Windows a slow drive will really slow the system down because Windows makes very heavy use of the disk all the time, but on systems like Linux or old versions of Windows you'll probably be fine.
yea, 15 min ofc, my hdd one took 2 billion years to boot up, cmon hdd r indeed slower, but not THAT slow, i had windows 10 installed on a crappy laptop 5400 hdd and takes 40 secs to boot, 1 min extra to be usable, so unless ur hdd is literaly broken it wont take that much
@@DragonProtector its overall responsiveness, and ofc, yes ssd is better but, its not like it takes 10 days with hdd and openning a folder takes 1 min... it works.... reasonable, with a decent hd with cache, add a 2000s hdd, sure its going to be crappy
I had that exact same motherboard and CPU. (although I upgrade to a Q6600 later on). It lasted from 2010 all the way until 2017, when the MB unfortanetely started to randomly fail to post. Had to abandon what once was an amazing retro pc.
I actually put in a 64 gb Sandisk SSD in an old Sony Vaio desktop PC with a Pentium D cpu from 2005. I also have it running Windows 10, but it's original operating system was Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.
Love the channel as always and the video. Sata ii is 3 Gbit/sec ~= 300 MByte/sec. I think things got a bit confused. The RAM cache will disappear on power off, however over time Windows may move data around on disk to defragment frequently used data. There was a system where you could use a USB flash drive as disk cache. Your processor+motherboard supports Optane which can accelerate old Sata disks quite effectively - depends on use case. It's a bit like the RAM cache case but bigger and non-volatile. Do try it for interest? However both the previous techniques use non-volatile memory (Optane is not flash memory) as cache, so might be considered as cheating. With my previous work computer I just installed lots of RAM and left in on so the RAM cache remained in place. Only way at the time to get round the poor performance of rotational drives.
Incidentally, before the time of SSD's a disk update still had a significant effect. As disk technology improved the increasing linear density of the data on the disk surface for each track increased the data rate passing under the head. For constant rotational rate then the data throughput would correspondingly increase.
@@Spido68_the_spectator SATA II is a second generation SATA interface, and it runs at 3.0 Gb/s, although the actual bandwidth throughput is up to 300MB/s, due to 8b/10b encoding.
i personally have absolutely no problem running modern hdd for game library, best combo for any pc imo is 250-500gb ssd for os drive + hdd for game library. I personally have samsung 850 evo 500gb ssd and 1tb western digital hdd. As my hdd got full im thinking of buying 4tb western digital hdd as i have no problem to wait 15 seconds or more for my game to load. People really recommend buying ssd's even for game library however for massive storage its still very expensive as 2tb sata ssd in my country starts from 200€ and i can get western digital gold premium 4tb hdd for 170€ . Many AAA games takes from 50-150gb space nowadays, 100gb is not so rare anymore, so your 2 tb ssd might fill in sooner than you think.
I was just wondering the same thing! I had a bookmark for a great site that had everything I was ever looking for but it shut down recently and now I'm trying to find a new place semi close to as good.
@@SirNickyT last time when i was watching Dawid's old video about 27inch monitor and ppi.. it also had a sunset wallpaper.. i was digging internet to find same.. but it was actually finding needle in hay stack if u don't know where to find one.
A more realistic proposal: Can you do the test with the fastest SATA3 HDD on new PC against the cheapest SATA3 compatible old PC with the slowest SATA3 SSD?
My work PC was a recent Dell that has an i7 8700 and is still insufferably slow because of the mechanical HDD. Luckily I convinced them to grab a 16GB stick of Intel Optane, which basically acts as an SSD cache/system accelerator, and the responsiveness is very tolerable now.
I've revived so many client laptops with SSD drives. The most recent was a relatively new Lenovo Ideapad i5 which was appallingly slow on it's 5400rpm drive, I opened it up to find an M.2 slot. Dropped in a drive and it went from 4:30 from switch on to desktop, to under 40 seconds. My diagnostic laptop I take with me to client sites is a tiny Thinkpad X60 (Intel T2400) from 2009, still works fine with an SSD under Ubuntu. Shame the next incarnations of Ubuntu no longer support 32bit processors.
Thank you this really makes me feel so much better when using old equipment and now knowing that it is not my skills it is the equipment. Keep up the good work 👍👍👍
This video is actually not pointless at all for my particular issue! My partner's PC is a faitrly old system (AMD FX) so seeing how an SSD still helps on SATA 2 really has made me reconsider the upgrade path for it.
Dude... terrific Video. I have been with you since about... under 3000 subscribers and I commented on the towel in the background. As I said then your delivery is great and your content is super fun and informative. This video was a true pleasure to watch. Your set is clean simple and well crafted. Your performance is natural and concise. I love the simple b - roll with the craft paper blocking for the comparison shots and the rest of it. I am not sure but I feel like you are using an ND filter but the film itself is looking great. Fantastic job all around. Keep up the good work.
Thank you very much for the awesome comment! Thank you for pointing out the filming and b-roll, I really enjoy the video making process. I really appreciate it when people comment on it. 😁 Thanks for sticking around the channel for so long. Tha
Have to say, without watching, the SSD is going to help a LOT! I installed a 120GB SSD into an old P3 1GHz. Boot times went from around 20-30 seconds, to about 4. Games load quick too and stutter was all but eliminated. Now, 120GB sounds small, but it originally had a 40GB IBM deskstar. Needless to say I had to use a SATA to IDE adapter. Not sure what to do about TRIM support as it's running Windows XP. Eventually it will slow down. But I only use that system perhaps twice a month when I want to play some old games.
The PC that I use for work had a HDD and as the computer aged my system started bottle necking just because of the HDD. It was so bad my computer became unusable. Finally I bought a SSD and now all my trouble have disappeared. Never going back to HDD
The SSD on my i3-6100 desktop system (since retired) died last year and I had to install a 2.5" laptop HDD while I waited for a warranty replacement. I couldn't believe how much slower it made my system. In fact, I thought for several days there was something horribly wrong with the hardware configuration that was screwing up Windows 10. As Dawid says, the boot times were horrendous, and while he does mention it briefly, the lack of responsiveness *after* Windows 10 finishes booting feels interminable. Never again!
Interesting video. Would like to see more like this where old boosted vs new skimped. Bottlenecks and hacks are much more interesting than watching the same tests on newest and most powerful hardware over and over on every channel.
For day to day usability e.g. loading applications and the OS, latency is the real killer, so an SSD is going to fist a mechanical drive quite violently in that regards irrelevant of what sata revision the drives are connected to. Also, sata 2 isn't limited to 300 megabits per second, it is actually rated for 3Gbps or 10 times what you've quoted, however it does cut the maximum read rate down to about 300 megabites per second or about 2.5Gbps once you deal with overheads, but that's irrelevant as like I said, latency is key for usability 👍 Edit: after finishing the video, I called it 😂 You're not wrong with Windows 10 and ram caching making things somewhat more tolerable though. And regarding the Windows 10 installation, did both systems have usb3? In any case, if you want your computer to be faster and don't have an SSD, get one! It's one of the cheaper upgrades nowadays, and should your system still not be snappy enough you can put the SSD into your next build
I did something similar to this last night in a 10 year old PC I have with an amd athlon ii x4 640. Just clone the HDD to the SSD and it boots and runs almost like brand new. I love making new computers but at the same time saving old computers from the e-waste landfills makes me feel good.
Swapping old HDDs with SSDs for basic office PCs saves LOTS of money. I highly recommend it. We have 10 PCs from the stone age that were given new life with a cheap SSD.
SSD on an old PC is just amazing. My 10 year old system boots windows 10 in 7-8 seconds. 250GB Samsung 860 EVO(BOOT), Q9650, GT 1030, 8GB RAM, 2TB Seagate HDD
HDDs really aren't that slow, once the chunk of sectors that are needed are found. THe problem is that getting the read head to the first sector takes milliseconds. The SSD could be SATA 1 and it would still trounce the HDD, even if the HDD were SATA III.
Haven't clicked play yet. Short answer to your questions, YES! A co-worker gave me his ten year old computer he uses once a week since he knows I refurbish/build computers for fun. He is now using his computer more often as it's not painful to do so. All times (M:SS) listed are to get Windows to a useable state. 2:42 initial test. 2:12 Swap from 8GB single channel 1333 to dual channel 1600 DDR-3 2:05 Upgrade his A5-5400K to A8-5800K 0:49 Clone his hard disk to an inexpensive SSD of similar capacity He says the computer runs butter smooth.
You called the video pointless at the end, but I disagree. I think this was actually a really valid demonstration for folks holding onto older hardware that are debating whether to upgrade the entire system, or just the storage. Hopefully folks have moved on past core 2 duos at this point, but they make surprisingly usable chromebooks / chromeboxes.
It’s not a useless video! I have a pretty sweet gaming setup (1080, i5 10400, 16 gb ram) but I run my games on a SATA 1 HDD, and it affects some of the games data streaming significantly. Such as driving really fast in Forza, it actually can’t load the map quick enough at times.
My hard drive is pinned at 100% for the first ten minuets after start up always. it’s the worst I bought antivirus software I can’t even use, because it’s always messing around down there. I need a new ssd drive. It’s got a decent i5 an ok gpu and 16g of ram but that disk is a nightmare of a bottle neck. This was helpful thank you.
3:54 I assume na system won anyway, as old system have almost no RAM for hdd/ssd cache. The biggest improvement in performance ever I have seen was when I upgraded 4GB RAM to 8GB RAM, all other spec left untouched.
From personal experience, I have a seagate 350gb external HDD as an internal one after my original died on me. The boot to the lock screen on windows 10 took 3 minutes at the fastest, while on desktop icons literally disapear due to the lacking access speed (refreshing restores it for a bit).
Not even Windows 7 or Android_x86 could speed up the system. Videos stutter every 10 seconds, games take minutes to load data if not crashing. I'm pretty sure the drive was just on the edge of death.
I clued onto this when I needed a laptop for university, with an SSD my 2012 business grade laptop (Lenovo X230 so not your typical big box retailer laptop) flies for the tasks it needs and is magnitudes faster than any new $250 machine. Can't believe that even laptops in the mid range price segments are still offering HDDs as default
Finally starting to see new laptops with standard ssd. I think the manufacturers were selling more pcs to unsuspecting consumers based entirely on the big numbers. They liked highlighting 1 TB storage in the advertising. The smart consumer is much better off with 256gb boot drive and maybe an external usb storage drive if needed.
I have a 256gb nvme and it's amazing and a 500gb HDD for videos and backups. I did have games on it, but they took forever to load. What I would like to see is a that hard drive with optane.
This is pretty nice comparison. Keep it up. Just somehow make it clearer. I got lost for the first few minutes as to why you are comparing the two but i catch up to the reason in the end. Old HDD are still valuable here in 3rd world countries. Some people can keep up the slow load times from mechanical drives as long as it can do the job done. Mostly web browsing Just now. I am repairing an old Toshiba M800 PentiumT4200. Im noticing the hard drive is quite decent (be it sluggish) but its making some heat beneat the laptop. Ive seen this a lot on laptop of this era. They produce heat a lot. Im thinking of suggesting SSD for the user (that only browse the web for SNS) but i dont know if she would really want it for the basic use
Great info Dawid. I have a few older motherboards that I still have operational. Limited to Sata2 interface. Adding SSDs really helped them become snappier. Matter of fact I just upgraded one last night.
Would be interesting to see the comparison with a third competitor: A new and quite fast SATA-III hard drive like a Toshiba X-300. But yeah: I'm also using SSDs as boot drives in almost all my computers even back to my Optiplex 780 from 2009 apart from some even older retro machines.
Please this video was not pointless, we going through a Covid recession (I need) and I just dusted of an old laptop that the hdd keeps bottlenecking at 100% usage, this video just convinced me to invest in an ssd 🤔
I don't know if I watch this because it is interesting and informative or because Dawid is hilarious. I would really like to see a windows 98 gaming PC built with new hardware.
Not many would understand that. I Was torrenting 10 files each not less than 1.5gigs. 2 chrome tabs open and 1 excel file. Core i5 2nd gen with 8gigs RAM. Am telling you it was like a snail learning to skid. 95-100% disk usage Upgraded HD to the cheap 500gigs WD blue SSD and i was in dreamland. Same tasks open - Less than 10% disk usage. That was 3yrs ago. Now its 970 EVO NVME all the way.
Changing from a 7200rpm Seagate FireCuda to an Intel 665p NVME is definately by FAR the most noticable upgrade i've ever done. Going from a 2500K to a 3300x itself did almost nothing when not in game and seeing the lower usage numbers. But the NVME drive made it a whole new machine. Whenever someone claims they got a smoother desktop from buying more cores, i know they actually replaced their ssd too. My moms Pentium G6400 has just as smooth and responsive of desktop performance as my overclocked 3300x does with twice the cores and threads. Both have the same ssd.
*my 2 cents* My dad's LAPTOP is about 9 or 10 years old. It has a 2C/2T Intel CPU, an Intel iGPU (no longer will use the NVidia 8600GS or whatever), but with a 60GB, slower SSD (and HDD now as secondary storage) it runs great with Windows 10... the MAIN things that really help it today are: 1) Windows 10 works much better than the original VISTA OS, 2) SSD helped a lot, and 3) upgraded from 2GB to 4GB of DDR2 memory (that was causing a lot of issues over the last couple years until I got 4GB of cheap memory for $15 that worked)
I remember the days when starting up a HDD only based PC was a pleasant, leisurely activity. You had the time to pee & poop, wash your hands, make some sandwiches and a nice cup of tea, then, after giving the plants a quick spray, you eventually returned to your PC, at which point it was finally ready to commence the day's work.
If you're gonna get an HDD get yourself the Seagate barracuda models. There's also super high capacity Seagate drives that run at 7200rpm. Western Digital also has the "black" series that are high cap, high speed HDD's.
For gaming and general use, SATA SSDs wouldn't be a bottleneck at all. On paper, they are. However, that only translates into niche useage (for example: moving large files). For game-load times, SATA SSDs load games virtually as fast as NVMe SSDs. Same seems to apply to boot times, too (contrary to popular belief). Anyway, cool vid!
I just did the same for my daughters 2nd Gen I5 laptop, out with the old 750GB HDD and slipped in a Crucial BX500, It installed windows in about 10 minutes from the flash drive and runs well for a 9 year old laptop, now just to upgrade the RAM to 8 GB and it will be a real flier :D
When we built my last upgrade with a small 128gig SSD it made a huge impact on boot to running time. Enough that I got a bigger sata boot drive for it and cloned everything over. Later I did the same for my 7 box I use for media center recording HDTV stuff I want to watch later commercial free. Made a big difference and if it isn't loading a ton of picky crap. Wish I had a newer board that supports the memory slot based drives, be even faster. You can buy adapter cards for older systems but not sure how well they work and anything somewhat current has SATA ports.
That 120 GB HDD must have been a real old one and its throughput will be very low, I expect between 40 and 60 MB/s. In the test you should have used a more modern disk with double the throughput. However the throughput is not everything, I have 2 HDDs one running at 135 MB/s and the other at 110 MB/s. That last one is faster, because the seek times are considerably shorter. The seek time is the time, it takes to move the disk arm. I do that kind of test almost daily, I have stored my Virtual Machines on 3 different types of storage: - nvme-SSD (3200/2300 MB/s) average boot time Linux ~10 seconds. Perfect! - Raid-0 from two HDDs (~240 MB/s) average boot time Linux ~50 seconds. Workable. - one HDD (~77 MB/s) average boot time Linux ~100 seconds. Unworkable too slow, however like in the past you get used to it! Boot and fetch a coffee :) I restored an old Pentium 4 for family and I used two left-over 40 GB Seagate Barracudas in Raid-0 and its Peppermint (Linux) boot time was ~55 seconds. Very nice for an Pentium 4 HT (3.0 GHz) from 2003. In 2019 I used a SATA-SSD instead of a nvme-SSD in my desktop and I remember, the average boot time of Linux was ~20 seconds. Good!
i have an old machine with a core 2 duo e6300 in it too! I wouldn't use it for anything demanding, but it will run windows 10, and it works pretty well for an old workstation
I actually just built my first gaming pc last fall, and after splurging on a really nice case, motherboard, gpu and cpu I realized, crap, dont have a ton of money left and couldn't decide what to do for storage. originally I wanted something with lots of room and very fast. Well that was now out of my price range. So I ended up just getting a samsung 970 evo m.2 250gb drive for the OS, and any really commonly used applications. Then on ebay i bought a really cheep dinosaur western digital hard drive., 5200 rpm with 3 TB of storage. A very weird combination indeed. It works great though. The dinosaur is great for saving word docs, pictures, videos and all my games. And load times for games are just about as they would be on ps4 since they basically also use the same speed hard drives. Not to bad of a route to go if i do say so myself, 1 fast small one and 1 big chungus slow boi
I tell people with older PCs/laptops that use HDDs who just use their systems for basic emailing, Microsoft Word/Excel, and internet surfing to just drop in and SSD. The SSD provides a massive performance boost and you don't have to unnecessarily purchase a whole new system.
One thing you left off(or rather, wasn't subject of the video in the first place) is that whilst you're right, the onboard graphics in an old Core 2 doesn't cut it anymore for watching TH-cam, and I would suggest fitting a GT 710 in there if it doesn't already have a graphics card. It's how my dad can still use his old Core 2 for everything he needs without any issues. £30 for a SSD and £35 for a crap graphics card sure beats buying an entire new machine. As for the SATA one being old, it makes me sad to hear that. My first computer only had ROM cartridges and cassette tapes(the same type you put music on) for storage. Considering ROM cartridges were read only, and cost £30(about £100, or US$150, with inflation), then everything was on tape, including my games. Floppy disks were available, but the drive cost more than the computer did. Not joking.
But I remember the days when a hard disk was the bees knees compared to running off of a floppy drive only system - but then I also remember the days when floppy drives were the bees knees compared to loading off of a cassette tape drive...and then I remember the days of how a serial terminal for entering a program was the bees knees compared to a punch card machine - but I don't remember the days of having to toggle the bits into memory from a front panel, so no, I never saw dinosaurs roaming around on the Great Plains - that was before my time
I'm not so sure!
oh god the punch card machine
Very funny. But very true. I can relate up to floppy drives only. Back then, basic programs loaded nearly instantaneously from hard drives compared to floppies.
Even listing directories and folders with the DIR command took some patience (with floppies), but I also remember being a lot more patient back then. 🙂
Upgrading my Amiga from a floppy drive to a 40 megabyte hard drive was an absolutely phenomenal upgrade.
This really makes me wonder if it can get any better from here.
Once you go SSD, you'll never go back.
Yeah, if I can help it I won't use a spinny disk in anything anymore. I hope that price point on SSDs craters; it's almost at critical mass where it'll hit spinny disk prices, but not quite. You see the delta really take off once you pass the 1tb price. A 1tb SSD is still about 2.7-3.0x the price of a platter drive of same capacity...but up from there, the difference skyrockets. I think a 1.5tb SSD is over $250 US for example at the time of this writing.
Yeah, they really ruin any other PC experience for you. 😁
Can confirm, built a PC with an SSD boot and HDD games library but eventually replaced the HDD. SSD's are really cheap and hard drives just not worth it if you play games
Even though it's more expensive, I decided to go all SSD in my PC. I have 3 1tb Samsung SSD.
I use two SSD's 500gb and a 40gb, one for boot, apps, and game, the other for Temp files and Disk Cache (never used). Then I have 8 TB Spinning DIsk storage for video, audio, and photo data. This is the bee's knees IMO.
Interesting video, one small correction though, it's easy to mix up bits and Bytes, but SATA 2 runs at 3 Gb/s (bits) or around 300 MB/s (Bytes). Which is about half that of SATA 3, but twice as fast as SATA 1.
Yeah thanks for pointing it out. I just misspoke in the video. 😁
No worries, thanks for the content. 😁
SATA 2 is not really 3 Gb/s, even when it is advertised as that. It is the baud rate, SATA uses 10b/8b coding, means the data rate is 2.4 Gb/s. Saying it is 3 Gb/s is the same as saying 100 Mb/s Ethernet is 125 Mb/s.
10b/8b means that 10 symbols (1 or 0) are send to transmit 8 bits. This is completely independent of the protocol overhead which you have on top of that.
I ventured down into the comments to say exactly this, glad someone else noticed it.
@@DawidDoesTechStuffMisspoke... Each single time...
And I totally didn't type down that comment, I misstyped an SMS.
ancient pc: uses a core 2
me watching this video with my core 2 quad:
Core 2 quad is still fine for daily use. It shows its age in photoshop or video editing and gaming.
My second pc is a core 2 duo e7300 and get 730(good win 10) 3gb ram (some random reason the motherboard can't accept more) 120gb ssd 320gb only for backup
You may not be able to run more if you are running a 32 bit version of windows. I had the same problem and realized that
@TH-cam Account lol upgraded to a ryzen 7 3700x shortly after my pc aint too bad anymore, my core 2 acts as a media center pc now
@@JudeTheTH-camPoopersubscribe im even wishing for a core 2 quad or duo, this guy must be thankful eh
That's why no matter how old a system I have, none of them that I own use a Hard Drive as a boot drive.
I think I will also be using an SSD in all my retro builds moving forward.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff I've managed to convert some SATA SSD's to IDE using some old adapters. Couldn't get it to work last time I tried though, either my adapter died or I pulled some wizard magic the time before and now I've lost the touch. But that's reaaaal retro when you're getting back to pre USB and pre SATA days. I'd avoid going that far back, assuming you're old enough to even have used old 66/33/16/8 MHz systems.
@@tonymorris4335 if u look on amazon, there are actually ide ssds u can use.
@@tonymorris4335 Depending on how retro it is, you can just do an IDE to CF card. Not like really old systems need large amounts of storage anyway. LGR uses a 4 GB CF in his 486 I believe.
@@tonymorris4335 IDE! I remember rounding my IDE cables with a razor blade & zip ties for leet airflow performance. Even did the floppy drive. Floppy drives...... now why didnt the Ls120 take off?????? Backwards compatible, no fuss. Compare that with burning a CD or clunky zip drives. (USB drives werent out yet) I dont get it. wtf ls120!
The biggest upgrade ever to my laptop was installing an m.2 ssd. It came with only a 5200rpm HDD from the factory so it was incredibly slow, even though it has an 8th gen i5 and sufficient memory. Imo it should be made illegal to ship modern computers without an ssd at least as a boot drive.
Things have definitely changed in the last 12 months. Best Buy sells more sub-$500 laptops with SSDs than with HDDs these days. You're often limited to 128GB which isn't great but for most people, it's not going to be an issue.
Was running regular hdd for long time think it was doing 3/mbs sometimes copying lol.
Smells like Apple's iMacs
2:25 it's actually 300MB/s, not Mb/s. Good old bit/byte confusion.
yup, megabits is for Internet.. so 300megabits would be roughly 30mb/s
300mbs = 3gigabit (roughly)
I hate that
@@Journetta 300 megabytes per second = exactly 2.4 gigabit
is exactly 8x
Saaattaaaahhhh
No Ss a tah
Now we know how to reach 20-30 FPS on CS:GO.
I feel like that's a pretty well covered topic on this channel. 😅
"The hard drive equivalent of polio" lol i love when you make these comments
great video, an SSD can help older systems longevity with windows 10 big time. I did this to a C2Q system that my aunt uses and she didn't believe me when I said I just changed the drive.
I recently upgraded my dads 10 Year old Toshiba Laptop (L350-264) from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and changed the Hard Drive 240GB to an Spare HyperX Savage 500GB SSD I had.
This upgrade and update made it a whole new machine
The answer is that hard drive bottlenecks are severe. Even with new HDDs. I have a new-ish laptop that came with a SATA3 5400RPM 1TB HDD and it ran like molasses on a sub freezing day. I cloned that drive to an old SSD that is 500GB and now that laptop flies. It won't game, but it loads Libre Writer in a few seconds instead of minutes.
Thank you for making this video; it does highlight the increasing importance of faster storage, it all adds up when going about day to day operations. Whats great about using SSDs in older builds is despite SATA/IDE limitations what really matters is its IOPS performance, how quickly it can handle a bunch of smaller files. In my first gen pentium 4 (using an sata to ide converter that plugs directly into the motherboard helps); it lowered my boot times of windows 7 from 5 minutes to 1.5; and a minute of that is spent on bios initialization. For myself; any build these days back to the original Pentium gets an ssd; even 486s and prior get sd cards, will never go back to using hard drives for anything but mass storage.
You could get a PCI SATA3 adapter for the old system, probably pretty cheap. That and max the CPU out for like $20. Core2Quad if you can, that should make a huge difference.
Dawid has dad jokes for days
I am the dad joke master. 😁
Dawid Does Tech Stuff that's what i appreciates about you
When I had to start using Vista, that was because my brand new PC (at that time) had more than 4GB RAM... The reason there was simple: With more than 4 GB of RAM our options were limited to Vista, Windows Server, XP 64 bit, Linux, BSD... But even XP 64bit had different driver model, compatibility issues, etc. so Vista was the reasonable way to go. For most other systems people didn't have to move to Vista, but if you wanted more than 4Gb you had to get Vista.
If you had less RAM you were better off with XP, as it offered more compatibility with existing software. Usually people who bought lots of RAM, bought it to avoid RAM being a bottleneck in an "otherwise very strong" system.
And people often said, if you fill your mobo with RAM use the biggest capacity DIMMs it will support, it will be helpful later. Those Vista systems often ended up with an upgrade to Q6600, which was a popular CPU and much cheaper then Core 2 Extreme (or even a Q6700).
So I feel your old system is a bit underpowered for a proper Vista era PC.
Thats the kind of information you simply don't get anywhere else!
😅
"Look at my horse, the steroids amazin', give it a boot, the load times are blazin', with a click on the drive your PC will fly, and then it will die when you install a spinny, 'Oooh that's pokey.' Mm do you think so? Well I'd better not show you where the SATA port is RAID..."
I am both very sorry and on the other hand not at all sorry for this.
Hahaha this is gold 👌🏻
Good job, now that damned song is stuck in my brain.
Sweet SATA port oh Sweet SATA port. Sweet SATA port yea sweet SATA port
I replaced my old laptop 2,5" HDD, now it feels fast like my main rig.
bcz 2.5 hdds r specially, crappy
Yeah I have a 2014 Asus laptop, i3, 8gb... It had a 500 GB 2.5" hard disk, when I swapped it for an SSD. Oh god, it felt like it's from 2024!
@@arencorparencorp2189 yea but i runs great on win 7 but win 10... oh boy talking about my 2009 laptop boot up is about 2 mins
@@whyers4782 well, makes sense i mean, w 7 was designed with these as the usual, widespread drives, like win xp was snappy with hdd, however win 10 was meant for ssd, as in 2015 adoption was raising, it also works fine on fast hdd with cache, but on slow, laptop hdds? horrible, it works but.. as tech goes.. i mean try to run w10 with a celeron dual core and 4gb of ram vs win 7...
I've climbed the mountains of bodies of gamers who've died having to wait for Windows to install or games to load.. MOUNTAINS.. upon mountains of our fallen brothers fighting the battle of load times.
So sad.
:P
R u serious? I play Minecraft on a hdd and need a SSD but have to wait till Amazon will start delivery here in Washington
Me waiting for battlefield 1 loading times with hdd
LOL back in the MPlayer days I ran as LAGG CREEP!!! because I ran old stuff and I had bad internet... but I was much feared back then, In the Quake room.. You may get me a few times but after that I wiped the floor with most people.. Those was the good old days... Because I was good at predicting what people would do and where they would be at even with bad, what we we call now days latency IE lagg back then.
Wow - all the Gary’s came out of the wood work with the Mega Byte/Bit chit chat 😂 what a fiasco you have caused Dawid!
Girl u so fine 😚
@@thealien_ali3382 curb your failed flirt.
@@thealien_ali3382 Simp
@@thealien_ali3382 stop putting them on pedestal, simp.
Thanks for the tips...
My dad has an All-in-one PC (Lenovo C200) with a 500 GB HDD, maybe from 2009 or 2010, at the time when "Windows 7" entered at market.
I'm thinking on change the HDD and install a 480 GB SSD. So, the Lenovo C200 will work faster with the SSD anyway.
I’m using two HDD’s for mass storage and a SSD for my OS
@Amazing_cool yessir. It’s pretty common knowledge, so gotta use them wisely lol.
that's the way to do it
I recently did the same. Changed my WD Blue 5400 for an NVMe 1 TB and I can now restart windows in about 40 seconds. With the hdd just closing down windows 10 took 2 minutes and then another 3+ minutes to start. Not to mention I went from pretty frequent drops in SLOBS ~10% a session on the hdd compared to fewer than 1% with NVMe in a 2 hour stream.
You must have a bottle neck on your mobo. My Sata 3 drive take about 20 seconds. I also have duel boot which slows the process.
On Windows a slow drive will really slow the system down because Windows makes very heavy use of the disk all the time, but on systems like Linux or old versions of Windows you'll probably be fine.
Other than boot times, it literally runs like an SSD in Linux even in the most bloated distros.
My PC at work took almost 15 min just to log into Windows (10). Swapped an IDE hard drive for an SSD. It now is almost immediate.
There might have been some bad sectors on the hard drive. That will make it even slower than it already is.
yea, 15 min ofc, my hdd one took 2 billion years to boot up, cmon hdd r indeed slower, but not THAT slow, i had windows 10 installed on a crappy laptop 5400 hdd and takes 40 secs to boot, 1 min extra to be usable, so unless ur hdd is literaly broken it wont take that much
Hard drive was old, and booting pxe
Tbh hd vs ssd not major boot time difference.
I tested and depends on hd spec.
@@DragonProtector its overall responsiveness, and ofc, yes ssd is better but, its not like it takes 10 days with hdd and openning a folder takes 1 min... it works.... reasonable, with a decent hd with cache, add a 2000s hdd, sure its going to be crappy
I had that exact same motherboard and CPU. (although I upgrade to a Q6600 later on).
It lasted from 2010 all the way until 2017, when the MB unfortanetely started to randomly fail to post. Had to abandon what once was an amazing retro pc.
I actually put in a 64 gb Sandisk SSD in an old Sony Vaio desktop PC with a Pentium D cpu from 2005. I also have it running Windows 10, but it's original operating system was Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.
Love the channel as always and the video.
Sata ii is 3 Gbit/sec ~= 300 MByte/sec. I think things got a bit confused.
The RAM cache will disappear on power off, however over time Windows may move data around on disk to defragment frequently used data. There was a system where you could use a USB flash drive as disk cache.
Your processor+motherboard supports Optane which can accelerate old Sata disks quite effectively - depends on use case. It's a bit like the RAM cache case but bigger and non-volatile. Do try it for interest?
However both the previous techniques use non-volatile memory (Optane is not flash memory) as cache, so might be considered as cheating.
With my previous work computer I just installed lots of RAM and left in on so the RAM cache remained in place. Only way at the time to get round the poor performance of rotational drives.
Incidentally, before the time of SSD's a disk update still had a significant effect. As disk technology improved the increasing linear density of the data on the disk surface for each track increased the data rate passing under the head. For constant rotational rate then the data throughput would correspondingly increase.
Thanks for all this infomation. 👍 I appreciate you taking the time to write this out. I just misspoke though. 😁
Since 1 byte = 8 bits, 3 Gb / s is 3/8 = 0,375 GB / s so 0,375 × 1 024 MB = 384 MB / s theoretical speed
@@Spido68_the_spectator SATA II is a second generation SATA interface, and it runs at 3.0 Gb/s, although the actual bandwidth throughput is up to 300MB/s, due to 8b/10b encoding.
@@Spido68_the_spectator i used ssd on sata 2 and its 286-285mb/s
i personally have absolutely no problem running modern hdd for game library, best combo for any pc imo is 250-500gb ssd for os drive + hdd for game library. I personally have samsung 850 evo 500gb ssd and 1tb western digital hdd. As my hdd got full im thinking of buying 4tb western digital hdd as i have no problem to wait 15 seconds or more for my game to load. People really recommend buying ssd's even for game library however for massive storage its still very expensive as 2tb sata ssd in my country starts from 200€ and i can get western digital gold premium 4tb hdd for 170€ . Many AAA games takes from 50-150gb space nowadays, 100gb is not so rare anymore, so your 2 tb ssd might fill in sooner than you think.
If you are buying hdd just make sure it is 7200rpm and have 64mb+ of cache, western digital hdd's are the best imo.
Just One question: where do u download ur desktop wallpapers... I always try to find similar but can't find one?
I was just wondering the same thing! I had a bookmark for a great site that had everything I was ever looking for but it shut down recently and now I'm trying to find a new place semi close to as good.
@@SirNickyT last time when i was watching Dawid's old video about 27inch monitor and ppi.. it also had a sunset wallpaper.. i was digging internet to find same.. but it was actually finding needle in hay stack if u don't know where to find one.
Wallpaper Engine on Steam for 4 bucks has the best Wallpapers
Check out the wallpapers subreddit. I have seen all of these wallpapers posted there
@@stianh.4587 ok thnks i will check.
A more realistic proposal: Can you do the test with the fastest SATA3 HDD on new PC against the cheapest SATA3 compatible old PC with the slowest SATA3 SSD?
The slowest ssd will nearly always beat the best hdd
My work PC was a recent Dell that has an i7 8700 and is still insufferably slow because of the mechanical HDD. Luckily I convinced them to grab a 16GB stick of Intel Optane, which basically acts as an SSD cache/system accelerator, and the responsiveness is very tolerable now.
I've revived so many client laptops with SSD drives. The most recent was a relatively new Lenovo Ideapad i5 which was appallingly slow on it's 5400rpm drive, I opened it up to find an M.2 slot. Dropped in a drive and it went from 4:30 from switch on to desktop, to under 40 seconds.
My diagnostic laptop I take with me to client sites is a tiny Thinkpad X60 (Intel T2400) from 2009, still works fine with an SSD under Ubuntu. Shame the next incarnations of Ubuntu no longer support 32bit processors.
Thank you this really makes me feel so much better when using old equipment and now knowing that it is not my skills it is the equipment. Keep up the good work 👍👍👍
"It's a Corsair Vengeance RGB Kit.
mMmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmMMMmMMMMmMmmmMm."
This does answer some questions that have been echoing around in my head about what to do with my old Alienware alpha. Thank you!
This video is actually not pointless at all for my particular issue! My partner's PC is a faitrly old system (AMD FX) so seeing how an SSD still helps on SATA 2 really has made me reconsider the upgrade path for it.
8:52 that offended me, and I'm not easily offended.
Dude... terrific Video. I have been with you since about... under 3000 subscribers and I commented on the towel in the background. As I said then your delivery is great and your content is super fun and informative. This video was a true pleasure to watch. Your set is clean simple and well crafted. Your performance is natural and concise. I love the simple b - roll with the craft paper blocking for the comparison shots and the rest of it. I am not sure but I feel like you are using an ND filter but the film itself is looking great. Fantastic job all around. Keep up the good work.
Thank you very much for the awesome comment! Thank you for pointing out the filming and b-roll, I really enjoy the video making process. I really appreciate it when people comment on it. 😁
Thanks for sticking around the channel for so long.
Tha
Have to say, without watching, the SSD is going to help a LOT! I installed a 120GB SSD into an old P3 1GHz. Boot times went from around 20-30 seconds, to about 4. Games load quick too and stutter was all but eliminated. Now, 120GB sounds small, but it originally had a 40GB IBM deskstar. Needless to say I had to use a SATA to IDE adapter.
Not sure what to do about TRIM support as it's running Windows XP. Eventually it will slow down. But I only use that system perhaps twice a month when I want to play some old games.
that cpu can handle windows 7.
The PC that I use for work had a HDD and as the computer aged my system started bottle necking just because of the HDD. It was so bad my computer became unusable. Finally I bought a SSD and now all my trouble have disappeared. Never going back to HDD
The SSD on my i3-6100 desktop system (since retired) died last year and I had to install a 2.5" laptop HDD while I waited for a warranty replacement. I couldn't believe how much slower it made my system. In fact, I thought for several days there was something horribly wrong with the hardware configuration that was screwing up Windows 10. As Dawid says, the boot times were horrendous, and while he does mention it briefly, the lack of responsiveness *after* Windows 10 finishes booting feels interminable. Never again!
Interesting video. Would like to see more like this where old boosted vs new skimped. Bottlenecks and hacks are much more interesting than watching the same tests on newest and most powerful hardware over and over on every channel.
For day to day usability e.g. loading applications and the OS, latency is the real killer, so an SSD is going to fist a mechanical drive quite violently in that regards irrelevant of what sata revision the drives are connected to. Also, sata 2 isn't limited to 300 megabits per second, it is actually rated for 3Gbps or 10 times what you've quoted, however it does cut the maximum read rate down to about 300 megabites per second or about 2.5Gbps once you deal with overheads, but that's irrelevant as like I said, latency is key for usability 👍
Edit: after finishing the video, I called it 😂
You're not wrong with Windows 10 and ram caching making things somewhat more tolerable though.
And regarding the Windows 10 installation, did both systems have usb3?
In any case, if you want your computer to be faster and don't have an SSD, get one!
It's one of the cheaper upgrades nowadays, and should your system still not be snappy enough you can put the SSD into your next build
Thank you! I'll now recommend any friends/family that don't have a pc with an SSD to change to one
I did something similar to this last night in a 10 year old PC I have with an amd athlon ii x4 640. Just clone the HDD to the SSD and it boots and runs almost like brand new. I love making new computers but at the same time saving old computers from the e-waste landfills makes me feel good.
Swapping old HDDs with SSDs for basic office PCs saves LOTS of money. I highly recommend it. We have 10 PCs from the stone age that were given new life with a cheap SSD.
The quality on this channel is amazing, how do you not have at least 300k subscribers?
I've got this P4 system from 2004 with a somewhat new 7200rpm SATA drive and that thing flies like no other WinXP computer.
SSD on an old PC is just amazing. My 10 year old system boots windows 10 in 7-8 seconds.
250GB Samsung 860 EVO(BOOT), Q9650, GT 1030, 8GB RAM, 2TB Seagate HDD
HDDs really aren't that slow, once the chunk of sectors that are needed are found. THe problem is that getting the read head to the first sector takes milliseconds. The SSD could be SATA 1 and it would still trounce the HDD, even if the HDD were SATA III.
this channel is worth it for his absurd analogies alone. watching it is like taking that first satisfying morning dump before you start your day.
Haven't clicked play yet. Short answer to your questions, YES!
A co-worker gave me his ten year old computer he uses once a week since he knows I refurbish/build computers for fun. He is now using his computer more often as it's not painful to do so.
All times (M:SS) listed are to get Windows to a useable state.
2:42 initial test.
2:12 Swap from 8GB single channel 1333 to dual channel 1600 DDR-3
2:05 Upgrade his A5-5400K to A8-5800K
0:49 Clone his hard disk to an inexpensive SSD of similar capacity
He says the computer runs butter smooth.
A good hard drive won't cause you any problems and won't cause a bottleneck at all but if you have an old shitty hard drive then yeah it will
You called the video pointless at the end, but I disagree. I think this was actually a really valid demonstration for folks holding onto older hardware that are debating whether to upgrade the entire system, or just the storage. Hopefully folks have moved on past core 2 duos at this point, but they make surprisingly usable chromebooks / chromeboxes.
It’s not a useless video! I have a pretty sweet gaming setup (1080, i5 10400, 16 gb ram) but I run my games on a SATA 1 HDD, and it affects some of the games data streaming significantly. Such as driving really fast in Forza, it actually can’t load the map quick enough at times.
I've been thinking about an SSD in my 12 year old PC, so this helped me decide.
My hard drive is pinned at 100% for the first ten minuets after start up always. it’s the worst I bought antivirus software I can’t even use, because it’s always messing around down there. I need a new ssd drive. It’s got a decent i5 an ok gpu and 16g of ram but that disk is a nightmare of a bottle neck. This was helpful thank you.
3:54
I assume na system won anyway, as old system have almost no RAM for hdd/ssd cache.
The biggest improvement in performance ever I have seen was when I upgraded 4GB RAM to 8GB RAM, all other spec left untouched.
Somehow those old SpinPoint P80 HDDs are just my favourites. I have a 160GB one for retro PC use.
Disease + Ketamine what a lovely pair Madam lol
I remember when I threw a 1st Gen SSD in my IBM t400 laptop my jaw dropping at the faster then ever 188-400MB/s transfer speed 😂
Just successfully transferred the OS from my Hard drive to my new NVME SSD, I have both in my system and now I feel like my PC can last longer now.
Interesting video. I use a Dell Precision workstation so fast bootups are not really a thing.
Oh yeah! I’ve heard workstations do tend to take their time to boot up.
From personal experience, I have a seagate 350gb external HDD as an internal one after my original died on me.
The boot to the lock screen on windows 10 took 3 minutes at the fastest, while on desktop icons literally disapear due to the lacking access speed (refreshing restores it for a bit).
Not even Windows 7 or Android_x86 could speed up the system. Videos stutter every 10 seconds, games take minutes to load data if not crashing.
I'm pretty sure the drive was just on the edge of death.
I clued onto this when I needed a laptop for university, with an SSD my 2012 business grade laptop (Lenovo X230 so not your typical big box retailer laptop) flies for the tasks it needs and is magnitudes faster than any new $250 machine. Can't believe that even laptops in the mid range price segments are still offering HDDs as default
Finally starting to see new laptops with standard ssd. I think the manufacturers were selling more pcs to unsuspecting consumers based entirely on the big numbers. They liked highlighting 1 TB storage in the advertising. The smart consumer is much better off with 256gb boot drive and maybe an external usb storage drive if needed.
I have a 256gb nvme and it's amazing and a 500gb HDD for videos and backups. I did have games on it, but they took forever to load. What I would like to see is a that hard drive with optane.
Once the HDD is ready for use, it's perfectly fine. Only issue is loading times for big stuff.
You could have tested paging performance though
This is pretty nice comparison. Keep it up. Just somehow make it clearer. I got lost for the first few minutes as to why you are comparing the two but i catch up to the reason in the end.
Old HDD are still valuable here in 3rd world countries. Some people can keep up the slow load times from mechanical drives as long as it can do the job done. Mostly web browsing
Just now. I am repairing an old Toshiba M800 PentiumT4200. Im noticing the hard drive is quite decent (be it sluggish) but its making some heat beneat the laptop. Ive seen this a lot on laptop of this era. They produce heat a lot. Im thinking of suggesting SSD for the user (that only browse the web for SNS) but i dont know if she would really want it for the basic use
I miss the days of turning on your computer, going to get coffee and urinating to return for the last few seconds of the boot time.
Great info Dawid. I have a few older motherboards that I still have operational. Limited to Sata2 interface. Adding SSDs really helped them become snappier. Matter of fact I just upgraded one last night.
Would be interesting to see the comparison with a third competitor: A new and quite fast SATA-III hard drive like a Toshiba X-300.
But yeah: I'm also using SSDs as boot drives in almost all my computers even back to my Optiplex 780 from 2009 apart from some even older retro machines.
Thanks for the upload! You should keep messing around with mid 2000s hardware
It is a fun period of hardware. 😃
Try dell dimension 8200 with an ssd 😃. You need special pci card though
How does dawid not have more subs? His view to sub ratio is insane!👍
Please this video was not pointless, we going through a Covid recession (I need) and I just dusted of an old laptop that the hdd keeps bottlenecking at 100% usage, this video just convinced me to invest in an ssd 🤔
I don't know if I watch this because it is interesting and informative or because Dawid is hilarious. I would really like to see a windows 98 gaming PC built with new hardware.
4:00 Dawid.exe has stopped responding
Installing a cheap SSD and installing a lightweight Linux distro does wonders for the longevity of a system.
Yeah i had a good pc with a old hard drive and when i switched to ssd i noticed the difference
An SSD is a dream when your RAM is full and the OS starts swapping to disk.
Not many would understand that. I Was torrenting 10 files each not less than 1.5gigs. 2 chrome tabs open and 1 excel file. Core i5 2nd gen with 8gigs RAM. Am telling you it was like a snail learning to skid.
95-100% disk usage
Upgraded HD to the cheap 500gigs WD blue SSD and i was in dreamland. Same tasks open - Less than 10% disk usage. That was 3yrs ago. Now its 970 EVO NVME all the way.
Changing from a 7200rpm Seagate FireCuda to an Intel 665p NVME is definately by FAR the most noticable upgrade i've ever done. Going from a 2500K to a 3300x itself did almost nothing when not in game and seeing the lower usage numbers. But the NVME drive made it a whole new machine. Whenever someone claims they got a smoother desktop from buying more cores, i know they actually replaced their ssd too. My moms Pentium G6400 has just as smooth and responsive of desktop performance as my overclocked 3300x does with twice the cores and threads. Both have the same ssd.
*my 2 cents*
My dad's LAPTOP is about 9 or 10 years old. It has a 2C/2T Intel CPU, an Intel iGPU (no longer will use the NVidia 8600GS or whatever), but with a 60GB, slower SSD (and HDD now as secondary storage) it runs great with Windows 10... the MAIN things that really help it today are:
1) Windows 10 works much better than the original VISTA OS,
2) SSD helped a lot, and
3) upgraded from 2GB to 4GB of DDR2 memory (that was causing a lot of issues over the last couple years until I got 4GB of cheap memory for $15 that worked)
I remember the days when starting up a HDD only based PC was a pleasant, leisurely activity. You had the time to pee & poop, wash your hands, make some sandwiches and a nice cup of tea, then, after giving the plants a quick spray, you eventually returned to your PC, at which point it was finally ready to commence the day's work.
If you're gonna get an HDD get yourself the Seagate barracuda models. There's also super high capacity Seagate drives that run at 7200rpm. Western Digital also has the "black" series that are high cap, high speed HDD's.
For gaming and general use, SATA SSDs wouldn't be a bottleneck at all. On paper, they are. However, that only translates into niche useage (for example: moving large files). For game-load times, SATA SSDs load games virtually as fast as NVMe SSDs. Same seems to apply to boot times, too (contrary to popular belief). Anyway, cool vid!
I just did the same for my daughters 2nd Gen I5 laptop, out with the old 750GB HDD and slipped in a Crucial BX500, It installed windows in about 10 minutes from the flash drive and runs well for a 9 year old laptop, now just to upgrade the RAM to 8 GB and it will be a real flier :D
I did the same with my 3rd gen I7 lenovo pro laptop and indeed, it's a beast now
Wait. I can tell you without even watching. This video was my life at one point. The HD will absolutely ruin your experience with any pc.
Can you make a funny video completely destroying a Hard Drive? HowToBasic style
That's a pretty good idea. We can see how much damage they can take. 👍
When we built my last upgrade with a small 128gig SSD it made a huge impact on boot to running time. Enough that I got a bigger sata boot drive for it and cloned everything over. Later I did the same for my 7 box I use for media center recording HDTV stuff I want to watch later commercial free. Made a big difference and if it isn't loading a ton of picky crap. Wish I had a newer board that supports the memory slot based drives, be even faster. You can buy adapter cards for older systems but not sure how well they work and anything somewhat current has SATA ports.
128 GB is very small, wears very fast
That 120 GB HDD must have been a real old one and its throughput will be very low, I expect between 40 and 60 MB/s. In the test you should have used a more modern disk with double the throughput. However the throughput is not everything, I have 2 HDDs one running at 135 MB/s and the other at 110 MB/s. That last one is faster, because the seek times are considerably shorter. The seek time is the time, it takes to move the disk arm.
I do that kind of test almost daily, I have stored my Virtual Machines on 3 different types of storage:
- nvme-SSD (3200/2300 MB/s) average boot time Linux ~10 seconds. Perfect!
- Raid-0 from two HDDs (~240 MB/s) average boot time Linux ~50 seconds. Workable.
- one HDD (~77 MB/s) average boot time Linux ~100 seconds. Unworkable too slow, however like in the past you get used to it! Boot and fetch a coffee :)
I restored an old Pentium 4 for family and I used two left-over 40 GB Seagate Barracudas in Raid-0 and its Peppermint (Linux) boot time was ~55 seconds. Very nice for an Pentium 4 HT (3.0 GHz) from 2003.
In 2019 I used a SATA-SSD instead of a nvme-SSD in my desktop and I remember, the average boot time of Linux was ~20 seconds. Good!
SAMSUNG SpinPoint P Series SP1213C 120GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive
Average Seek Time 8.9ms
Average Latency 4.17ms
i have an old machine with a core 2 duo e6300 in it too! I wouldn't use it for anything demanding, but it will run windows 10, and it works pretty well for an old workstation
That was a very heartfelt JA! at 9:23 lol
I actually just built my first gaming pc last fall, and after splurging on a really nice case, motherboard, gpu and cpu I realized, crap, dont have a ton of money left and couldn't decide what to do for storage. originally I wanted something with lots of room and very fast. Well that was now out of my price range. So I ended up just getting a samsung 970 evo m.2 250gb drive for the OS, and any really commonly used applications. Then on ebay i bought a really cheep dinosaur western digital hard drive., 5200 rpm with 3 TB of storage. A very weird combination indeed. It works great though. The dinosaur is great for saving word docs, pictures, videos and all my games. And load times for games are just about as they would be on ps4 since they basically also use the same speed hard drives. Not to bad of a route to go if i do say so myself, 1 fast small one and 1 big chungus slow boi
Ah yes, a classic DDTS video where David bamboozles some poor PCs.
HE said eMachines!!! Lol. I had one those long, long ago! I haven’t heard that name in decades. Nice video Dawid, thanks!
I tell people with older PCs/laptops that use HDDs who just use their systems for basic emailing, Microsoft Word/Excel, and internet surfing to just drop in and SSD. The SSD provides a massive performance boost and you don't have to unnecessarily purchase a whole new system.
7:45 megabytes*
SawTaa...
Please stop your giving me PTSD
One thing you left off(or rather, wasn't subject of the video in the first place) is that whilst you're right, the onboard graphics in an old Core 2 doesn't cut it anymore for watching TH-cam, and I would suggest fitting a GT 710 in there if it doesn't already have a graphics card. It's how my dad can still use his old Core 2 for everything he needs without any issues. £30 for a SSD and £35 for a crap graphics card sure beats buying an entire new machine.
As for the SATA one being old, it makes me sad to hear that. My first computer only had ROM cartridges and cassette tapes(the same type you put music on) for storage. Considering ROM cartridges were read only, and cost £30(about £100, or US$150, with inflation), then everything was on tape, including my games. Floppy disks were available, but the drive cost more than the computer did. Not joking.