SSD upgrade

A couple of months ago, I gave my computer its first significant upgrade since I buffed the RAM to 24 GB.

I’d been wanting to add a SSD drive to the system for a while now, and finally bought a 250 GB Samsung EVO 850 to function as the boot drive.

Installation was pretty easy. The hard part was fishing out a spare power cable and finding a spot to secure the drive. The case is technically out of free drive bays, but SSDs are pretty thin, and I was able to find enough space between the CD drives and one of the hard drives to secure the SSD to.

Once the drive was installed, the computer got a fresh Fedora 25 install with the SSD as the boot drive. As expected, once all the packages were downloaded, installation went quickly. Really quickly. For a fresh install I’m used to leaving my computer alone for an hour or so while it’s installing packages. With the SSD, everything was installed and I was rebooting in under 30 minutes.

Boot times for my computer are around 1/3 or so (haven’t really timed it) of what it used to be booting off the spinning disk. A couple months in, I haven’t noticed any significant change in performance and there’s still plenty of room left on the SSD.

The original boot partition has been changed to a /var mount point and now the computer is on Fedora 26 Alpha.

Now I want to get SSDs to put into my laptops.