SSD Archives - Page 2 of 17 - Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: Can you recommend a really cheap, but reliable SSD for an older laptop?

Posted on September 8, 2025

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Question from Ari: The hard drive in my 6 year old Dell laptop died a few days ago. This has been a great machine and I don’t want to just trash it.

I’d like to replace the bad hard drive with an SSD, but I’d rather not spend a lot of money if I can help it.

After reading your post about replacing Windows with Linux, I’d like to install Linux Mint on this laptop and use it as my primary Internet computer. I won’t need a lot of storage space so a fairly small SSD should be ok.

What I’m looking for a really inexpensive SSD that’s large enough to hold the new Linux installation and maybe a few Chrome extensions. But I’d like the SSD to be as reliable as possible. [Read more…]

Q&A: Would moving the Page File to a RAM Disk make a PC run faster?

Posted on July 1, 2025

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Question from Ethan: I was reading an article last night that discussed using part of a computer’s unused RAM as a RAM Disk, and it got me to thinking.

I have a 6 year old desktop computer that’s running Windows 10. It has 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive.

This machine runs really slow, coming almost to a crawl at times. After doing some research I’ve determined that it’s likely sluggish because it’s doing a ton of swapping back and forth with the page file.

Do you think moving the Windows Page File to a RAM Disk would help speed it up? [Read more…]

Q&A: Will replacing the hard drive with an SSD make a PC run hotter?

Posted on April 28, 2025

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Question from Michael: I have a three year old laptop that runs a bit on the warm side. It always has, ever since I first took it out of the box.

I read your post about replacing a hard drive with an SSD and I’d love to replace the existing 1TB hard drive in this laptop with a 1TB SSD.

The thing is I’m afraid it will cause the laptop to overheat since it’s getting really warm already. Do you think it might? [Read more…]

Q&A: Which is faster, the fastest hard drive or the slowest SSD?

Posted on February 22, 2025

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Question from Rod: My friend and I were discussing the advancements that have been made in technology when an interesting question came to mind.

Are the fastest hard drives made today still slower than the slowest SSDs?

I say no, but my friend says yes. [Read more…]

Q&A: Do SSDs need to be backed up like a hard drive?

Posted on January 26, 2025

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Question from Brenda: I took my laptop to Best Buy after the hard drive crashed and they installed a 2TB SSD for me. I can’t believe how much faster the computer runs now.

Luckily I had a backup when the hard drive crashed. I was reading an article today that said SSDs don’t break because they have no moving parts, therefore you don’t really need to back them up.

Is that true? [Read more…]