SSD. Worthwhile?

I doubt its worth it. Even with a modern quad core CPU, I see SSD drive technology as high end and relatively expensive. It certainly is not "needed" at all for the purposes of photo editing and image archiving.... Not for photo digital asset management at all really.

I'd argue that DVDs and Blu-Rays make more sense as something to bring into a system

I beg to differ. SSDs are not particularly expensive and you only needa small capacity one to contain your opetaing system and programs - data goes on the usual hard drive. I have a 250GB SSD and it makes the system much faster - in particular start up time is reduced to seconds. Whether you can do it yourself depends upon your level of expertise and confidence in doing it. I got a local computer firm to do mine. I would highly recommend the upgrade.

Hi Simon

Yes, it's worth it, yes it's DIY'able, it will improve the speed of processing files dramatically, especially if you have limited RAM and there's a lot of disk writing going on.

It's also more secure than a moving parts hard drive, which are prone to fail at short notice.

Regards
David

But it's a question of 'worth what and for what ...'.

If the system lacks RAM capacity, then it would be best to get more RAM.

Is it worth the expense, risk and effort for what specifically the user needs? A hard drive would not normally be the key limiting component in a PC.

I'd think it would be better to start from scratch and get a new PC with components that match each other and complement each other in terms of performance.

Yes and yes. The difference is so massive you will feel pain when using your other drives

If you know what your doing and can be bothered reinstalling it's worth it... Your laptop may not be top of the line but it will speed up boot times, plus applications and images will load faster.

At the end of the day if you do upgrade the laptop later take out the ssd and get a usb3 caddy and you have a good backup drive.

I recently upgraded my laptop with this and more ram and it made a huge difference. Although I only went for a 240gb on as my laptop had 2 drive bays.

I doubt that an SSD would help much there either Richard!

I'm not disagreeing that an SSD is a superior product over a traditional disk drive .... I'm just trying to keep it in perspective, and focus on exactly the benefits it would bring to simonmac specifically ....and of course the cost vs risk / hassle equation.

I don't feel that the reliability argument is a strong point .... the way to mitigate properly against disk failure is not to buy an SSD .... its to have a strong backup regime, and have a couple of independent backups at that. I'd advise 2 USB hard drive backups plus double layer DVD or Blu-Ray copies of all your photo files. Plus of course at least one of these stored at a different place than your computer.

I don't get the impression that Simon is a 'power user' in terms of commercial amounts of images to process, therefore I don't think the file loading times for Lightroom and export aspects would be that significant. He's already said he's not worried about bootup times. A new Win10 system with an average spec nowadays only takes up to a minute to get going anyway. The CPU and RAM will have a major influence on that also.

I agree with Richard earlier in that if choosing an SSD its best to keep that small, and the cost down, and use it for the operating system and programme installations. An economical 1Tb disk drive surely is the best value choice for storing photos on a Laptop, for future editing and viewing.

Unless there's a real interest in DIY computer tinkering as a bit of fun, then surely the safest route is to look at a new machine with good value all-round specs. We don't need more than an i5 or A8 CPU for photos, and 16Mb RAM is loads for those tasks. If a new machine could be got that included and SSD at a reasonable price, then great. I am assuming that Simons laptop is around 4-5 years old already ... ?