Replacing HD’s

[Mr. Torture]

I have an older PC, custom built by PC Audio labs. I think it’s around 13 years old.

I would like to upgrade to solid state drives, do you think it’s worth it? Or should i just replace the whole PC?

Thanks in advance!

Edited May 1 by Mr. Torture

[Amberwolf]

Does the computer do everything else you want?  

 

Are you looking for something other than the silence SSD drives provide?  

[mettelus]

Can you post the specs on the computer as it is now? That will help us a lot. If that computer has all spinners in it, you will see a major improvement just from swapping out the O/S drive. Samsung's Magician software will run clones easily, and for an O/S drive 500GB is more than sufficient. Reason I say this is for imaging purposes (smaller they are, faster they image/restore). Swapping data drives with SSDs will give improvement, but not as noticeable as with the O/S drive unless you have massive sample libraries you use in projects (in that case you will).

I have carried forward a 3 TB HDD through 3 computers now, and it is the only HDD in my machine. I primarily use it for internal backup and download storage, but spinner drives tend to not catastrophically fail if they do go and are permanent (barring sticking a massive magnet on the disc and/or opening the enclosure). SSDs have gotten far better in this regard, but write cycles specifically will degrade longevity (so as an O/S drive they will see this... keep that in mind). SSDs primary advantage is read speed over an HDD (and the O/S drive will use this most). The only two SSDs I have had to replace (due to noticeable degradation) were both O/S drives.

[Mr. Torture]

Intel core i7 - 3770k @ 3.50 GHz

32 gb ram

windows 10 pro

[HIBI]

First of all, I personally think that changing the OS drive from HDD to SSD is worth more than the cost. This is because the processing speed associated with drive access will increase dramatically.

However, your PC is not officially compatible with Windows 11. Support for Windows 10 will end in October, but do you have any plans after that?
That will affect whether you should upgrade to an SSD or get a new PC.

[Starship Krupa]

On 5/3/2025 at 4:39 AM, Mr. Torture said:

Intel core i7 - 3770k @ 3.50 GHz

32 gb ram

windows 10 pro

IMO, that is still a valid system for running CbB and Sonar. One of the Cakewalk devs, Mark MacLeod, uses an i7-3770 system in his studio, as did I up until a couple of years ago.

You will see a HUGE improvement in speed changing your system and programs drive to an SSD.

If your motherboard's BIOS supports booting from them, installing a PCIe NVMe adaptor (they are cheap, under $10 at Amazon) with a 500GB NVMe is the best investment.

When the time comes to build a new system, you can use the NVMe drive in that build, so it's in no way money thrown away.

If your BIOS doesn't support booting from an NVMe, even switching to a SATA SSD will give you a massive speed increase in boot and program loading.

I use Clonezilla for drive cloning.

Regarding Windows 11 compatibility, you have choices. First, there are well-known ways to trick a non-compatible system into upgrading Windows 10 to Windows 11. Second, if you're concerned about security issues, you can keep Windows 10 and use a 3rd-party malware solution.