So I found an SSD I want on sale, and it seems great decent reviews all that, now is there anything I should know before I get it like to begin with what is RAID? Also my OS is currently on my Hard Drive, is there a way to move it to my SSD when I get one? Anything else I should know?
NO. DON'T GET THAT SSD. Get the Crucial M500 240gb. You will be much happier.http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-240GB-2-5-Inch-Internal-CT240M500SSD1/dp/B00BQ8RM1A/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398806535&sr=8-1&keywords=crucial+m500
I'd avoid the ssdNows! there have been reports of them using substandard flash and not hitting performance targets or failing after limited use. The 840 Evo is a very nice drive for the money. I'm very happy with mine.
RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks. It is a storage technology that combines multiple physical disk drives into one logical drive that is then presented to the computer.
RAID can be implemented on a hardware level through a RAID controller or through software.
There are multiple levels of RAID which are assigned a number. (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5) for example.
Each RAID level offers different combinations of mirroring, parity or striping the data across drives to give you a performance increase or redundancy.
RAID 0 stripes data across two or more drives so read speeds and write speeds are increased. However, if one drive fails you lose the data on the other as well.
RAID 1 is simple mirroring. The contents of one drive are mirrored exactly onto another. You get half of the installed capacity (2X1TB drive would give you 1TB of storage) but increased data security because you always have a back up. Read speeds are increased but writes are slower.
Those are fairly common in the consumer PC market although you will see RAID 5 in NASs and other things like that. Check the Wikipedia article or watch Linus's Fast as Possible video about RAID. He will make it easier to understand.
Although you most likely won't be using RAID anyway.
Yes, most SSDs come with software that will allow you to migrate your OS and some programs to the drive but for best results a clean install is recommended.
BTW, I thought you were buying more memory not an SSD?
SSD I think should come first, and what do you mean a clean install because I dont have Windows on a disc, it came on my computer, yeah it's an OEM that I changed a lot
Like DerKrieger said, avoid the SSDnow and generally any SSD that uses the Sandforce controller. The Sandforce controller uses compression to reach the advertised speeds, and when you are working with incompressible data (movies, music, encrypted data) the speed drops dramatically.
If you get the Crucial M500, don't get the 128 GB version, it has significantly lower sequential write speeds than the larger versions because of the low number of NAND die (less parallelism).
EDIT: as far as cloning software goes... you can simply make a bootable linux USB drive and use the command dd, which will copy the physical structure of a drive (partition, file, etc) to another file or partition. It's free. Here:
Sorry for hijacking the topic, but I'm quite keen on upgrading my SSD. Is the M550 a lot better than the M500, or is the M500 just fine? To me it seems like a slightly better revision.