Using SSD drive to replace system drive on Pavilion Elite HPE-180t - compatible?

[Dealio]

Question #1: Does anyone have experience replacing the system drive on the 180t with a SSD drive? Is SSD compatible with the SATA controller? From the specs page for the 180t, it is implied (under hard drives section) that the board is capable of SATA 3G (SATA III?) although the hard drives listed are only 3Gb/s drives -- that's how I read it, but I may be wrong.

Just to be specific, I'm considering the Samsung SSDs, but am open to other brands considering reliability, power consumption, speed and compatibility with the 180t. I haven't looked at the Kingston Hyper-V SSD yet, but will consider it too.

Question #2: If an SSD drive is compatible with the 180t, I'm considering replacing the system drive with a 1TB SSD drive, replacing the secondary drive with a second 1TB SSD, and installing Windows 10 Pro on it instead of Windows 7 Pro. There again compatibility with Windows 10 is the question. Anyone have experience with Windows 10 on the 180t?

Question #3: What is the power consumption of SSD compared to traditional hard drives? My assumption was they consume less power, but I'm researching that just to be aware of power requirements.

TIA,

David

[Big_Dave]

Hi,

The Truckee motherboard, x58 chipset, will run SATA III devices but the speed increment using SATA III is marginal. I had the HP e9280t with the same motherboard. The latency time of a SSD is a lot less compared to most HDs.

I ran W8 on the e9280t with no issues so I suppect W10 will also work.

The 10K HDs on your PC suck up a lot of power compared to a SSD.

If you are using the TV tuner in your PC then search for a W10 driver now before going to W10.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi, @Dealio

I came across this Intel spec on the chipset your PC has, and the max drive controller speed is SATA II (3.0 GBPS).

https://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/prodbrief/x58-product-brief.pdf

In any event, a SSD will really pep up the performance of the PC.

I have SATA III SSD's in two of my HP desktop PC's that only have SATA II controllers.

They work great.  The boot up time and seek times are subjectively much faster than with a 7,200 RPM HDD.

[Dealio]

Thanks Paul.

Somehow it didn't occur to me to check the specs on the chipset. I'm not so technical anymore, so I guess I missed that. Thanks.

You mention that you use SSDs and are happy with the results. I wonder if you use them in RAID 1 for redundancy or if you would recommend that. I ask because SSDs are relatively new to me and I don't trust them like a regular hard drive, but I recognize that my impression may be outdated. If you do use them in RAID configuration, what benefit are you looking for and if you don't use them in RAID configuration, are you comfortable with their life expectancy? Or is your work on that machine more casual and not important enough to merit using RAID?

Thanks

David

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome, David.

I have never set up a RAID array before, so I couldn't help you with that question.

I can say that I wouldn't see any issue with doing so, and SSD's should be more reliable than a standard HDD.

If you look at the specs for one, it will probably be in excess of 1,000,000 hours of life.

I have this desktop model SSD in my HP 8200 Elite CMT and you can see that it is rated at 2,000,000 hours MTBF.

https://ark.intel.com/products/81038/Intel-SSD-730-Series-240GB-2_5in-SATA-6Gbs-20nm-MLC

[Big_Dave · Accepted solution]

@Dealio

If you can find SATA II SSDs that are cheaper than SATA III SSDs then go for it. As I said, your PC will support SATA III SSDs but the speed increase is marginal. I tried both SATA II and SATA III SSDs with the Truckee motherboard and the speed increase was barely 10% depending on what type of benchmark was used.

RAID 1 has a bit more safety for super critical data but you pay a performance hit as the data has to be written to both HDs. Additionally, you lose the space of the second HD.

RAID 0 provides double the space and a significant increase in data transfer speeds as the data is scattered across both drives. The downside is if one HD fails then you lose all the data.  The upside these days is that SSDs are quite reliable so normal scheduled backups per your own risk factor should be sufficient.

Unless you have an extremely high write pattern to your HDs, SSDs will probably out live you.

-----------------------------------

I am running RAID 0 NVMe SSDs and they have been solid as a rock and extremely fast.

[Dealio]

Thanks Paul. I am just nervous about relying on them because I have no experience with them and recall a bad history. But I'm updating myself by listening to the input from you guys with more experience! Thanks I appreciate it.

I have 2 machines -- a desktop (my real target) and a laptop that I use casually, both from 2010. The laptop is the Pavilion Entertainment PC dv6t-2100 and its running Windows 10 (upgraded from Windows 7 Pro when Win10 it was free). I noticed that it is very slow sometimes, and the reason is almost always disk I/O. So it's an ideal candidate to extend the life of it by using SSD. I've checked the HD specs and it's a SATA II drive from Hitachi and the formfactor is the same as the Samsung EVO 850, so it looks as though it will just plug right in. If so, the key will be transfering the OS and data -- which isn't critical -- to the new SSD. Dave pointed out free software that does this, which I'll have to check into. But I think I like his suggestion of using Recovery media best.  If this works, I'll have a useful laptop again and a tried process to follow with my desktop. The only issue with the desktop is that it's currently Windows 7 Pro x64 so the recovery process won't work for a Windows 10 upgrade on it. I believe I'll have to upgrade it first, which is problematic as it is having some display driver issues now that I haven't resolved. Ugh! Long story.

Thanks for your help

David

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Anytime.

Glad to have been of assistance.

I put SSD's in all of my HP notebook PC's and 3 of my 4 HP desktop PC's.

Haven't had one SSD fail yet, and I do monthly backups on the one desktop PC I most often use.

Only one desktop and one notebook can run the SATA III drives at the SATA III speed.

As I wrote yesterday, they run circles around the standard 7,200 RPM hard drive.

Just note that if you plan on using HP recovery media to reinstall an operating system, the hard drive has to be the same size as the original one that came with your PC, or not any smaller than the smallest one offered by HP for that model series, or most likely the recovery disks won't work.

[Dealio]

Thanks Dave!

Lots of good experience you have there. In fact it was your signature that got me thinking about using RAID with the SSD. But it can get expensive.

I'll heed your advice on SATA II vs SATA III, though what I've seen mostly on Amazon is SATA III SSDs.

I have two systems:

• laptop (HP dv6t-2100 2010 vintage) upgraded from Win7 Pro x64 to Win10 Pro x64
• desktop (HP HPE-180t 2010 vintage) running Win7 Pro x64.

My Target Configurations:

• have the laptop running Win10 Pro x64 using a 500GB SSD system disk
• have the desktop upgraded to Win10 Pro x64 running on 1TB SSD system drive and a 1TB SSD second drive (for photography data)

My question is regarding the HP Recovery process that both you and Paul mentioned. I'm not so familiar with it and I realized that when I read it, I was thinking of the Windows Recovery process, which is probably not what you meant. So my questions are

1. With which one of my targets above would the HP Recovery process be the best approach?
2. Is the HP Recovery process specific to the version of Windows it was installed on? That is, if it initially came on a Windows 7 Pro desktop, will it work to recover the same system that's been upgraded to Windows 10 Pro?
3. How do I initiate the HP Recovery Process -- I assume it can use a variety of media to store recovery data? For example, an attached eSATA drive would be my choice.
4. If my desktop upgrade above requires using the image transfer process instead of the HP Recovery process, of the three free packages you mentioned, would you recommend one over the others?
5. Would the Windows Recovery Disk process be of use (superior in any way) for either of these systems?

My real interest is in the desktop because it's what I use for photography. But since it's running Windows 7 it's gonna take more effort. I think the laptop is the simplest case since it's already running Win10Pro. I just have to buy an SSD and transfer the system to it.

Thanks

David

[Dealio]

I found an answer to questions about the HP Recovery process on my laptop. The Recovery Manager that I have says it will only recover the machine to its original running state. So that means for my laptop, it would revert back to Windows 7 Pro x64 and therefore would not be a means for transferring my Windows 10 system drive to an SSD.

If the same holds true for me desktop (haven't checked it yet), then it appears that the HP Recovery process will not be an option for moving my system drive from the original disk to the SSD. Unfortunate. I was hopeful.

Dave, when you used the HP Recovery process, I'm guessing you used it in combination with Windows recovery process, no? Otherwise I don't know how you retained your applications and data.

David