Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregg Bell
Hey. I've got a new project. A Dell GX520 (see screenshot 757) crashed at work (and I got it before it was thrown out) and via "Disks" utility I saw the hard drive was bad. I wasn't sure if I wanted to try to get it going again (and the expense involved) since it's old but it's also 64 bit so I figured, What the hell. (And believe it or not the computer it will be replacing (my home computer) is even older: and only 2GB RAM and 32 bit processor)
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Agreed on taking it to 4GB RAM. What's in my desktop at the moment is mostly Centon RAM. It's one of the budget lines, but entirely adequate. If I had a bleeding edge blazing fast gaming machine I might go for the high priced spread and spec Crucial or the like, but there is no need in the current system.
Since you are looking at replacing the drive anyway, I wouldn't go with either drive you linked to. Both are traditional spinning platter hard drives. I'd go with a
solid state drive.
SSDs are NAND Flash memory configured to look like a traditional drive, and packaged to plug in where a traditional drive would go.
When I got the current desktop (a refurb Dell Small Form Factor model), it came with a 2.4ghz quad-core Xeon processor, 4GB RAM, Intel graphics, and a 250GB SATA HD, with Win7 Pro installed. Base price was $250.
I added RAM to take it to the 8GB supported by the Intel chipset the Dell used, a low-profile AMD/ATI graphics card with 1GB video RAM to replace the built in Intel graphics, and a 240GB Crucial MX-100 SSD to be the boot drive. Total price after my additions was about $550.
The MX-100 came with a license for a version of Acronis True Image software which made cloning the existing Win7 Pro installation on the HD to the SSD fast and simple. Clone Windows to the SSD, set the Dell to boot from it, and Voila!
(After I cloned it. I repartitioned the SSD to carve out a slice where Ubuntu would live and installed it in a dual-boot configuration. At this point, grub2 offers three choices: Ubuntu, Win10 in the SSD, and Win7 on the HD. Works fine.)
SSDs are
fast. Windows boots to a usable desktop in about 45 seconds. Ubuntu boots to a Login: screen in about 30. Large apps run comparably quickly. Going to SSD was the single best enhancement I made to the system, and a "Why didn't I do this before?" experience.
Back when I was first looking at them, the opinion among the techs I knew was "Use Intel", but the technology has steadily refined and improved. These days, I'd use Crucial (a unit of long time memory vendor Micron Technology) or Samsung in a heart beat, and there are other budget priced vendors like PNY in the mix that seem acceptable. (There are about five vendors that actually make NAND Flash media. The rest source from one of them and put it in their own packaging with their own label.)
The usual concern about SSDs is drive life. SSD drives are divided up into memory cells, and the nature of NAND Flash is that there is a limit of about 10,000
writes per cell. Beyond that, the cell becomes unusable and is marked bad, like a bad sector on an HD. But the drive firmware attempts to evenly spread writes over all cells, so it will take a
long time for any cells to actually be
written to
10,000 times. The drives are also over-provisioned, with lots of spare cells, and as a cell reaches its limits, data is transparently migrated to a spare. You are likely to replace the whole machine before you even
notice drive wear.
The one thing you'll want to do in Linux is make sure TRIM support is configured on the drive, but that's a simple change to a config file.
Look seriously at getting an SSD. I think you'll be very happy if you do it.
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Dennis