I am sure that it may have crossed your mind to replace your main system drive from the old and slow mechanical SATA drive to a faster SSD. Looking at the prices of SSD will show that that it’s about £1 per GB (give or take) and to have full advantage of the speed on offer, you need to have a SATA III Connection (6GB/Sec). The main issue will be one of space; it is easier than you think to fill a 120GIG Drive. Recently I had a new works laptop (Dell Latitude E6420) and this came with a SSD Drive installed (Samsung SSD PM810) and the boot time of 30 seconds was impressive until you realise that this is a fresh build Windows 7 and not joined the domain.

OS Speed (Apple)
With a normal 7200rpm Drive fitted to the apple, I can boot in 30 seconds or less, this is more than normal for OSX. One of the main good things about SSD then is it will bring windows loading times closer to that of apple. How many times do you power your computer from scratch during the course of one day? Maybe twice at most and waiting an extra one minute is not really that much of a pain.
General day to day use
I have not seen an amazing difference starting application on the laptop considering I went from an E6400 which featured Core 2 Duo and 7200rpm drive to E6420 with Latest Core i5 and SSD.  I am sure there is a speed difference of maybe a second or two but in day to day operations, most of the uplifting is been done by the increased processor speed rather than the fact it has an SSD in there.
Would I buy one of the desktop pc?
I can get my hands on a 120gig SSD for about £120 but as I only have SATA2, I will not get the full speed. I could add the price of a card to give me sata3 which is adding another £35 to the mix. My question of course is that would I see a major benefit to my system for the extra £150 or would the speed difference wear off after a week of using it, I think the latter.

Views
Have you gone to SSD and did you notice a major difference? Would you put your hands on your heart and say that it was money well spent or did you just think it was great as you spent so much money on the device? I would love your hear your thoughts on this.

If you own more than one computer, you may find that some items would just work better if they were held in one central location and each computer could access these files no matter which computer was on – such as your MP3 Collection for example. This can take the form of dedicating one computer as a server if you like and left on 24/7, you could build your own NAS box or buy one of the many off the shelf – all are good but have a downside normally. I plan on jotting down my thoughts to give each idea a good going over and seeing how it look at the end – join me on my journey into NAS.

Server based sharing

When I said server here, I mean a computer with FIle and Print Sharing enabled and various drives shared out, this can be Windows (any), Linux or Mac based OS. What happens here is we take a machine, put as many hard drives as you have around /  can afford and basically use the share option. One the other computers you browse the network and map a network drive which connects on start up and you have access to these files all the time. The good side of this is any computer can be used but for me at least, the bad side is that depending on how quiet the computer is – this can be a noisy solution to the problem and also eating up electricity 24/7 (250+ Watts). It does mean though you can plug in USB Drives (or even eSATA if the machine supports this) and add this to the shares without having to wipe the drives first.

Build your own NAS (Proper hardware)

The first item you are going to need is a nice case that is small, quiet and can hold more than one drive – we could get Fractal Design Array R2 Mini-ITX NAS Case

This bad boy holds SIX Harddrives, you need an Mini ITX Board and maybe even a sata raid card. The cost of this case is about £149 and looks nice and should be a lot quieter than a normal desktop case. next on our list would be of course the Mini ITX Board – Intel D410PT With Integrated Intel Atom Processor D410 and the Intel NM10 Express Chipset M-ITX Motherboard

This motherboard comes with the ATOM CPU which means it does not need a FAN – very quiet indeed then and the price look at that site is about £56. You need to buy some memory, this takes DDR2 and has two slots, for a NAS Box, you do not need a lot – so a single 512MB Stick will do you fine – so we can add another £10 to the price. The last thing you need of course would be some hard drives – after all what use is a NAS without such a thing right? At this point it comes down to cost vs. capacity.

One example here is 1.5TB sata drive this comes in at the bargain price of £57 or you can branch out and buy a 2TB Drive for about £88 but this has a lower spin speed of 5400RPM for example. What it comes down to is this – if you bought three 1.5TB Drives, you will be spending £171 and have 4.5TB of space (formatting means you loose some of that of course) compared to two 2TB Drives setting you back £176 but only giving you 4TB of space. The upshot is the end game, 6×1.5TB is 9TB and 6x2TB of course is 12TB – quite a difference one you fill the drive bays up over time.

Counting up the cost so far then – we would have spent close to £400 on a system that has a potential capacity of 12TB, looks nice and is quiet.

What software to use?

The Software I would suggest would be FeeNAS – this is very flexible and included various add-ons such as BitTorrent Server and an iTunes Server.

The Pre-built *Cheap* Solution

One example here is an Edimax NS-2502 NAS Box, this comes with NO Drives but has all the features such as BitTorrent Server, iTunes server and so forth as well as GigaBit Network port, USB for connecting extra drives and so forth.

The price of this is £99, add to this 2x2TB Drive (£80 each) and we have a 4TB NAS Box for a price of about £260 – this is a lot cheaper then the solution above but you are limited of course to only two drives.

The last option is to buy a single drive NAS Box – in this case a Western Digital My Book 2TB NAS Box. This device is listed as £150, cheaper once again and it has a USB Port so you can stick your existing USB Drive in there and share that out, no metion of iTunes server and such.

Thoughts

How much you spend on a NAS depends on many things such as how much capacity you need, how much redundancy it offers (Such as RAID 0, 1,5), other services it comes with such as Torrent and iTunes for example and finally how quite plus power consumption of the offending device. At the moment my main source of files would be Backdrops (I have a lot), my Tunes and maybe my movies. If I moved to a more central storage arrangements, I could give up the 1TB Drive and the 750GIG drive and replace that with something a lot smaller – remember if all your data is now central, why do you need such a big OS Drive?

My Pick of the day would be the Edimax box – lots of features, cheap and good reviews…

GetFoldersize allows you to determine the size of folders and sub-folders on your hard drive. Determine which programs are taking up your hard disk space. For each folder, you can display the total file size and the number of files and subfolders in the folder.

If your after working out what is eating up the space – there is many utilities out there that tell you, some free, some shareware. If you just want to do a folder size analysis without all the radial graphs and eye candy that many popular folder scanners sport, GetFoldersize gives you the information you need in a simple and straight forward interface.

Folder scanners with lots of eye candy have their place—lifehacker has certainly reviewed a few like FolderSize, Disk Space Fan, Space Monger, and the classic WinDirStat—but sometimes you just want a simple listing of the biggest folders and files on your drive.

GetFolderSize analyzes drives, folders, and sorts files by size across the entire drive or selected folder. You can sort by file size, percentage of drive or folder consumed, or the number of files or sub-folders. GetFolderSize is freeware, portable, and Windows only. Have a favorite tool for seeing where your drive space has gone?

I won a copy of Rollback RX in a competition some time back – I had two copies and initially installed it on two machines, one been a desktop and the other a Laptop. I have since come up against a few issues with this software that at this time have made me remove it and revert back to the normal System restore that comes with windows.

First Issue

The first issue was that by default, it stored the initial image and without any further user intervention, it would not store any-more and also it switched of system restore so your left with a system that could lose a lot of work. You can go in and change the settings so that upon the first boot of the day, it does a snapshot and the way it does this is one big snapshot and then whatever has changed since the last one. This means if you downloaded a large file (say a DVD ISO) and left it on the HD for a day or so then deleted it – the image will be much bigger due to it keeping this file just in case you needed it back. The fact it has to image the drive each boot (first of day), it slows down the start-up of the computer and if it feels the need to defragment the images (an option you can switch off) – this is even longer to start the computer.

Serial Problems

It is not un-common for me to format my drive and do a total operating system install for a fresh start and this is where I hit the next problem. It told me that the Serial had already been used the max number of times even though this was the same machine, the same operating system and so forth. What I had to do was contact support and either let them reset the number of times it had been used or in another case, get a whole new number. I can see this been all too easy to forget which serial is valid any longer.

Eating Space

The final nail in the coffin came about when I noticed the Hard drive on the laptop (160 GIG) was full, it had like 1GIG Free (roughly) and I started to waste time getting programs to locate the missing space, running disk cleaners and so on but nothing was telling me were this space had gone. It crossed my mind Rollback RX was eating the space, I went through the program and deleted all of the images apart from the very 1^st one and the last two. I rebooted the computer (thinking it was some weird windows fault not showing the drive space properly) and was left with a DOS prompt after Rollback RX had completed it load – Windows 7 was now dead it seemed.

Removal

I started the computer and pressed the HOME Key when Rollback RX came up to select restore and choose the image from first boot that morning – this got me back to Windows working – but still a drive that was full minus any of the program or space I had already cleared out. At this point I had enough, I uninstalled RollBack RX, it rebooted and presented the Rollback RX Loading screen and informed me it was been uninstalled. It sat at 0% for at least one hour – I closed the screen down and left it running overnight as it was late.

Wndows 7 Loader died

In the morning I was met with the same broken DOS Screen (loader) and now I had to set about trying to fix this. I was to be honest going to leave it till later and re-install Windows 7 but I thought I would try a couple of things first.

Fixing the Boot loader

I booted from the Windows 7 DVD and selected fix problems – this claimed there in fact was no problem so I tried another trick, same DVD and typed in BOOTSECT.EXE /FIBMBR & /FIXBOOT (just in case). A quick reboot and this fixed the issue – we had Windows 7 back up and running and now only 30 GIG was been used – so in effect RollBack RX had consumed in the order of well over 100GIGs with no clear way to see where it was used.

Conclusion

Even though the theory of this software is better than System Restore in that it started before even booting the Operating system which means if you are stuck in a Blue Screen of Death you can go back to a point where the software worked. Even though I do have the full version, I think I am better off not using it..