Maybe a pretty good deal?

[9idrr]

Stopped at a favorite thrift store in town and rummaged through their 'puter parts bin. Took one thing to the counter and asked 'em how much. Kid thought $3.99 was a good price and I agreed. Walked out with a Kingston 120GB SSD, NIB. Love that place.

[papaof2]

Got an HP 120GB from newegg.com this year for $18 and free shipping but your price is better ;-)

[9idrr]

Problem is deciding which machine gets it.

[papaof2]

Whichever machine you want to not be limited by the speed of its hard drive ;-) Or maybe more frequent trips to the thrift store?

I upgraded a Dell D620's 60GB original SATA with a relatively inexpensive SSD and then had to check that I hadn't plugged the power supply into a 480 volt outlet because it was so much faster ;-)

I really like having an SSD in a laptop because I can move it whenever and wherever I choose. If it gets bumped, there's no spinning drive to worry about - although some of the newer magnetic hard disks can take over 100G intermittent shock without damage. I think that might translate to dropping the laptop less than 6 feet on concrete but I don't plan to test it ;-) My current cell phone took a 5 foot fall (metal belt clip on the case slipped off my belt) and it survived with a tiny crack in an unused corner of the screen so some of the newer stuff is very durable.

Because the solid state memory cells can only be written XXXX times, whenever a file is changed it's moved to a new area of the SSD. That means the SSD should never be filled more than 60-70% for longest life, which means this laptop needs at least a 1TB drive or I need to move some big things (.iso files of Win 7, 8, 10, free "office" packages and the like) to the 2TB drive on the desktop PC.

[9idrr]

Yeah, I'm leanin' towards my Toshiba laptop with W7. Has a 500GB HDD but the 120GB should be plenty for m needs.
Any recommendations as to cloning software? For everything up through XP I've had good luck with Acronis Migrate Easy, but I don't know if they've released something comparable and foolproof for Win7 and I don't need anything that isn't idiot-proof.

[papaof2]

I've used Migrate-OS from Paragon for XP but haven't upgraded that for Win7+. There are several other vendors.

I'd be doing a migration today but the SSD has a glitch that it's no longer visible when the laptop reboots in "Migrate" mode. Looks like I'll be doing a build-from-scratch on this next drive, after which I'll wipe the SSD and see if it can still serve as the target for a migrate. With all that's on the laptop: books I've written and their supporting references, spreadsheets I've created for the size of the solar systems the people build (and the hours they last without sun), etc, etc, etc, plus writer's tools (spot differences between two versions of the same Word document), the original install packages of downloaded software (even Chrome for XP) the complete rebuild from scratch runs about 18 hours. At least I've been able to get the 2TB drive formatted (now at 85%) while doing other things so that should be finished in an hour or so. Think I'll do an image backup with Reflect when the new drive is finished so I'll have a "current copy" for re-doing the SSD.

[papaof2]

My current suggestion for migrating an OS to a new drive is Disk Genius. It's free and I know that it works at least through Win 10.

www.diskgenius.com

[bitsmith]

Hello, all!

Been a long while since I've been here. Recently picked up a 250GB SSD (PNY) for $7 in a thrift store. It was DEAD. Not recognized in a known working system. Contacted PNY and was able to get an exchange at no charge. Arrived in 3 days via USPS.

So, even when buying bad devices, you might be able to get it replaced. PNY offers a 'lifetime' warranty on some of their drives and RAM.

[feralferret]

Bitsmith, good info. Thank you!

[papaof2]

I have a 32GB PNY thumb drive that just won't die. It's a "sliding cover" design so there's effectively a cap for the USB connector - but it's one that can't get lost ;-)