The question however is if you want to shell out the extra bucks for that visible speed gain and I think it comes down to a discussion among video card enthusiasts. Some purchase the top product that produces a few additional frames but costs double the amount of the video card that computes less frames. Still both make the games playable.

It’s the same with the current generation of Solid State Drives except for a few scenarios where they really shine. They need less energy to run and are completely silent which makes them an ideal candidate for a notebook hard drive replacement. That’s in my opinion the number one reason to purchase a Solid State Drive, to place it in a mobile device or computer that is being used as a media player.

samsung hard drive benchmark

ocz core series ssd benchmark

samsung hd103uj benchmark

ocz core series ssd 64gb benchmark

Where operating systems and desktop computers are concerned I would probably wait for the next generation that surely sees another huge price drop and speed increase.

Don’t get me wrong.. The Solid State Drive is faster than my shiny new Samsung hard drive, it loads pretty much everything faster but some of its gains, the silence, can only be effective if I would remove the conventional hard drives and that is not possible until the flash drives come with sufficient storage space.

Conclusion:

You should consider buying a Solid State Drive if..

• You turn on and off the operating system regularly
• You load and close many applications and files during the computer uptime
• You do not need space but energy efficiency or silence
• You want bragging rights
• You got the money to buy one

Everyone else is better of waiting for the next generation of flash drives in my opinion.

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The situation seems to be changing slowly with 64 Gigabyte SSD drives available in larger quantities and better prices. One SSD drive that I was looking forward to was the OCZ Core Series SSD drive with 64 Gigabyte capacity and the guys at Hot Hardware managed to get their hands on one of those drives and compared it to the ultra fast WD VelociRaptor hard disk.

While the OCZ Core Series SSD drive lacks behind in write speeds (tops 87 MB/s compared to 129 MB/s for the VelociRaptor) it managed to win the read speed benchmark (140 MB/s compared to 123 MB/s) and of course in random access times.

Far more impressive than those computed values are values from real applications, and those tests make a difference.

How about a Windows Vista startup of 51 MB/s compared to 15.6 MB/s for the conventional hard drive ? Similar results are available for gaming (77 MB/s vs. 12.5 MB/s), application loading (21 MB/s vs. 3.7 MB/s) and Windows Defender (66 MB/s vs. 19.8 MB/s). The SSD drive managed to beat the hard drive in every test which has to be attributed largely to the low random access time.

This convinced me and I just ordered a OCZ Core Series SSD drive with 64 Gigabyte capacity for 200 Euros. Once I have that will do some tests with various operating systems and benchmarks.

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Far more interesting is the information about the supported and active transfer mode. If the active transfer mode does not equal the supported one you need to check on that because your hard drives are not running at top speeds then. A list of supported features of the hard drive is also shown which give you a wealth of information as well.

The temperature of the hard drive is shown in the program window as well and in the system tray so that you can react if it should rise to a level that the manufacturer deemed risky. If that is the case you need to check on the cooling system of the computer and probably add another fan to it.

Hd Tune has a separate health tab that checks several variables and displays their status. If something does not look right in this menu you should definitely consider backing up all important data and consider purchasing a new hard drive.

Two scans are available. The first is a simply benchmark that tests the read and write speed of the drive while the second is an error scan that lets you know if sectors on the hard drive are damaged.

I would not run HD Tune all the time but every now and then to check on the hard drives. It’s a good feeling to know that everything is alright.

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This is why experts suggest to either overwrite the hard drive with random data before formatting it or running tools like Eraser to erase all data on the hard drive.

The HDD Low Level Format Tool will low level format a hard drive erasing the whole disk surface in the process which has the result, that it is impossible to restore data afterwards. It supports SATA, IDE, SCSI, USB, FIREWIRE and Big drives (LBA-48) and the most popular manufacturers Maxtor, Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba, Fujitsu, IBM, Quantum and Western Digital.

I did not try that hard drive software yet because I do not have a spare hard drive lying around that I could use to test it with and I did not want to format one of my hard drives just for the sake of testing it. If any of you do test the software let me know about the results please. Running a recovery tool like Recuva after formatting the hard drive should show us if the data is really not recoverable.

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The analysis does not only count directory sizes but uses the information to put the files into categories like system, office, graphics and movies. Each category displays its file count, total file size and the percentages of both. Additional statistics provide information about the percentage of file sizes on the hard drive, file dates, top 50 largest and smallest files, files with 0 Kilobyte and file extensions.

Reports can be generated and exported as html or xml files. Xinorbis can also do a full drive / partial drive comparison which is interesting if you are mirroring partitions or want to compare differences between hard drives.

The downside of this program is that it is not responsive during the scan of the hard drive. It takes a few minutes to scan a normal sized hard drive but the comparison took more than an hour before I stopped the program from running.

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The toughest part is to answer the question about the upgrade itself. Which components do you want to upgrade, does it make sense to upgrade it and how much will it cost ?

My first thoughts when I’m thinking of upgrading a pc are always “More RAM”. Ram is absolutely crucial and if you are stuck with 1 Gigabyte of Ram or less you might consider upgrading it to 2 Gigabytes. Ram is cheap at the moment which means that you can get 2 Gigabytes from companies like Kingston, GEIL, OCZ and Corsair starting at $50. The next step would be 4 Gigabytes which start at roughly $100.

Just check the manual of your motherboard first to make sure that you buy the right RAM for your system. Another advantage of adding RAM is the fact that you it is relatively easy to add to your system. Takes less than a minute to replace.

The second choice really depends on what you do with your computer. If you are a gamer you might consider getting one of those new Geforce 8800 GT which start at $270 and make it possible to play Crysis and other high end games in high details. Again, check your computer to see if it supports AGP or PCI Express Video Cards before going out and buying one that does not fit.

Both RAM and Video Cards have the advantage that replacing them is easy and requires minimal knowledge whereas adding a new CPU for instance is lots of work.

My third choice would be to add another faster hard drive to the computer. If you just need more storage you could buy an external hard drive with capacities of 500 GB or more which can be plugged into an USB port. I use two of those and have them fully encrypted with True Crypt.

If you want an internal hard drive you have to make sure that you can fit it into the computer. Again there is SATA and IDE drives, make sure your computer has the necessary cables and support for the drives that you choose. Replacing the main hard drive with a new one takes some time though.

Buying some smaller components is also an option. I tend to buy a new keyboard every 6 months and a new computer mouse every 12 months. Other choices could be a sound card, speakers or a headset.

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Solid State Disks have no moving parts which means they make no noises whatsoever, have a largely reduced access time, are not prone to electro-magnetic failures, have a lower power consumption, no heat generator and a better ability to endure extreme shock.

Solid State Disks do have some limitations though. The most dominant ones are currently availability, pricing and capacity. The largest capacity of Solid State Disks is 128 Gigabytes at the moment which I have seen for sale for roughly $3800 (SUPER TALENT 2.5″ 128GB SATA Internal Solid state disk). More affordable units are 32 Gigabyte Solid State Disks (for instance the SAMSUNG 32GB IDE Internal Solid state disk) that retail for roughly $400 and 16 Gigabyte disks for $200.

My next computer that I will build next year will have one of those Solid State Disks as the main boot hard drive resulting in faster boot times of the operating system, lower noise level and faster response times. I will still use conventional hard drives for storage mainly because the pricing is currently way out of line. Reminds me of the good old days when a 10 Megabyte hard drive cost that much.

If the pricing drops to around $500 for 64 Gigabyte drives I would buy one of those instead but I’m perfectly fine with a 32 Gigabyte Solid State Disk as well. My current Windows partition has only 10 Gigabytes so even a 16 Gigabyte Solid State Disk would be fine.

This technology will be even more exciting for notebook owners. They could for instance replace their conventional hard drive with a solid state disk to reduce the noise level and speed up all processes.

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I was thinking of something different though. What if I want to keep my hard drives for now but make sure that deleted data can’t be recovered by any means ? I tried and ran some file recovery programs such as Recuva and it showed thousands of files that were still referenced on my system although they have been deleted before. I think that this is a privacy problem and decided to look for a way to delete all file information on the unused part of my hard drives.

I decided to use Recuva first and see how many file information it would find. After that I would run a program named Eraser which I will use to clean the unused disk space of any deleted file information and finally run Recuva again to see if this reduced the amount of files that could be undeleted from my system.

Testing my Hard Drive with Recuva:

Recuva found 33720 files on my hard drive f: that could be undeleted. This is a large amount of files.

Running Eraser:

After right-clicking the central pane I was able to create a new task. The first option was unused space on drive which is the default option in the menu. I selected the f: hard drive from the list. Eraser was showing my newly selected task in the central pane and I had to right-click that task once again and select Run from the context menu. It took two and a half hours to overwrite all the data on my 100 gigabyte hard drive.

Testing the result with Recuva:

Recuva found one file on drive f: Everything else was not found anymore which leads to the conclusion that this is an excellent way to erase file information that exists on the unused space on your hard drives. This is probably not enough to erase it for the big boys if you know what I mean but every amateur should have problems getting information about those files.

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HDD Health monitors some of the important key factors of modern hard drives such as temperature, read and seek error rates and performance. If one variable reaches a critical value you are informed by HDD Health and should take counter measures. The first would be making a reliable backup of your hard drive, the second thinking about ways to fix the problematic values.

If the temperature for example is reported to be of critical value you should think of improving the air flow of your case, get hard drive coolers, add more fans or move from air cooling to water cooling. Other errors such as read write errors prove to be more complex. They could be temperature related of course but if the temperature is not critical it is an unlikely reason.

So, the main advantage you get is to receive a report before a crash or hard drive failure occurs giving you time to react and backup your data.

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