The difference in boot times after I swapped a dying hard drive for an SSD

I had a client bring in a Dell OptiPlex last Tuesday that took over 4 minutes to get to the desktop. Swapped out the old 500GB mechanical drive for a Samsung 870 EVO I keep in stock. Same machine went from 4 minutes to about 15 seconds of boot time. Anyone else see a huge change like that just from replacing the boot drive?

3 comments

3 Comments

dakotab931mo ago

Wait did I actually used to think SSDs were overrated? Because yeah I totally did for a while. I had this old laptop with a 5400rpm drive and I just thought that's how computers worked you know? You turn it on and go make a sandwich while it loads. But then I put a cheap 240GB SSD in a family member's netbook that took like 5 minutes to boot and all of a sudden it was opening Chrome in 10 seconds. That's when it clicked for me. It's literally the single biggest upgrade you can do to an old computer no contest.

ray3561mo ago

...and here I am taking 4 minutes just to find my car keys every morning. That Dell story hits close to home. I did the same swap on an old laptop I use for watching YouTube in the kitchen. Went from coffee break length boot time to basically instant. Made me feel like some kind of computer genius for 20 bucks and ten minutes of work.

hugoj121mo ago

Feeling like a computer genius for 20 bucks" is honestly the best part lol. It's funny how the smallest tech fix makes you feel like a wizard, but finding your keys is still the real hard puzzle.