PC crash narrowly avoided

It seems that every 2-3 years, I need a new PC. For one reason or another. This one happened to coincide with the New Year, and coincidentally, the last one was right about January 2013, and before that, pretty much January 2011.

This time, I was working on a project (work / real job stuff) when I heard a couple of rather audible clicks, then a really high pitch but barely audible squeal, followed by the screen going zigzag like an old tube screen TV when you adjusted the horizontal hold (I just dated myself). Anyways, the PC proceeded to reboot without the usual "windows did not shut down properly" on startup. I thought that was odd.

Several other times, I would come back after leaving for a while to find the screen was stuck on "please insert bootable media" message like it tried to start up but there was no hard drive...checked, and yep, 2TB Seagate drive still there....hmmmm. Shut down, give it a few minutes, and it rebooted back in just fine. Kids playing Minecraft caused it to go wacko a couple times also, but Minecraft is hard on a PC (never seen one pump out heat like that) Luckily, I have a second 2TB USB backup for home & work so no data loss was hanging over my head.

So I grabbed up a used PC from the local PC recycler, an HP 6000 Pro Quad Core 2.6GHz w/8G ram & Win 7 Prp 64 ($175) and got me a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB (solid state drive) and after cloning I was up and going...and I might say, I am SOLD on SSD drive my friends, sold. Bootup, program install, so fast man...so fast. After reading that you really don't get much by adding more than 8GB of RAM, the SSD is the next logical choice. But 250GB is not enough space for me.

So after I dumped all I could off the old drive, I cloned it to an old Western Digital 1TB drive (just to make sure my old PC was still "there" in case I forgot something) and wiped the 2TB drive. Then I d/l'd Acronis Drive Monitor and lo and behold, that drive was at 29% reliability! All other drives (backup 2TB, old 1TB) were still at 100%. So the cuplrit was found. This made me recall a few times when I shut the PC off and that drive was too hot to keep my hands on - definitely something wrong with it, and I blame heavy AutoCAD and Minecraft use.

Off to the store for a brand new 2TB drive, installed, formatted, and now I'm back on my feet...maybe i should get a few extra case fans too, just in case...

So, there went my weekend...

 

I've been lucky so far, I think I had one HDD crash on me but it just wouldn't load the OS, that was back in win98 days. I was able to get a new HDD going and recover most of the data.

What I've been doing for a few years now is keeping a large drive in an external USB enclosure, I take that back and forth with me to work so I back up my work server and my home PC to it, and backup my work server to my home PC as well. Works well for transporting my Thunderbird between the 2 PCs as well so basically my USB is a full backup of my home PC, then I use Beyond Compare to synch them on both ends (that program is worth the donation, much better than SynchBack or the like)

I use the SSD as primary and the 2TB as storage for all my media. Pretty much everything but e-mail and the files that I most commonly used. Actually I haven't fully decided what will be on the SSD vs HDD but it won't be much.

@Matt Berry you say 180G SSD minimum? After ripping off all of my data from that flailing 2TB drive, I only had about 70G in system files (that included all installed programs like SQL server, AutoCAD, etc). I was going to pull the trigger on our work laptops and a few desktop PCs and get something that was more in the 120G range. My PC, which is likely the one that has the most stuff on it since I am the defacto IT department, has about 170G on a 250G drive it but 70+ of that is my personal stuff (also mirrored on the 2TB drive) which I would likely keep on the 250G drive, leaving only 90 on the main drive. Most everyone else would have more like 60G + email so I thought 120 would be fine - you're making me re-think that.

I suppose the price difference between 120 and 180 is probably not that much though...

 

Here's one for you. My work server is an old Dell Poweredge 2900. Just a file server right now. Running Raid 6 with 6x 73G 10000K drives (1 hot spare). I was thinking of making these SSDs instead of finding 6 larger (and likely, used) 10000K drives. Thoughts?

 

Just checked 2 PCs at work, one is a laptop with 300G and the other is a 250G, both of them use only 60G. So what would be the problem with using a 120g on these? Right now on Amazon I can snag a Crucial 128g for $60 or 256g for $90. I'm not THAT much of a penny pincher when it comes to work PCs, I just like the knowledge...

 

Actually I just read a review of Windows 7 & 8 memory useage and they basically said that unless you are doing high-end gaming or big DB applications, more than 8GB of memory will do virtually nothing for you. There was about a 30% increase in benchmarks from 2GB to 4GB, then about 3% more from 4GB to 8GB, but in most cases W7 never really used more than 4GB of memory.

The old standby used to be the #1 way to increase performance is to max out your ram (back in XP days, that was 4MB IIRC) and that worked. Beyond that it was up your processor, MB, etc. Now it seems that with a quad core PC at 2.5 GHz or better running Win 7 Pro 64-bit and 8GB of RAM, you're covered for just about anything you can throw at it for the normal everyday user. Seems the current way to increase performance is now the SSD.

FWIW I'm running the same PC (without the SSD) at work using AutoCAD LT 2015 and unless I'm working on a drawing with a really big/complex Xref (which, unfortunately, I am right now) I never have a lag. What's even better is that I bought it used for $225 which included a dual video card (which I replaced with a better one) and a 17" Dell monitor & keyboard/mouse. I'm willing to bet there there is a PC recycler in just about every major city that carries stuff like this, I'm just glad I found ours a few years ago. I have saved thousands over the years - replaced a dozen work PCs twice in 5 years.

 

Got 2 Crucial M550 128G drives and 2 Crucial MX100 256G drives today, replaced 2 desktop drives and 2 laptop drives. Same result - lightning fast boot times, program load times, etc. Now I just have to wait out the pricing for a bit until I can replace my 2TB storage drives. The jury is in on this one for me, if you don't run SSD you have no idea what you are missing out on.

 

Doh! Not one in Iowa, typical, there's on in KC and MN though. And Illinois.