Help Laptop drive upgrade

Michael G Parry-Thomas

Still trying to decide which hard drive to go for

My laptop first drive as a 120 ssd which as Windows 10 install on it

My 2nd drive is a 1tb hard drive this as my L8 installed on it

My library as 12,000 resources

Question

Would a 2tb hybrid drive be the best way to go

Which would be 5x faster

Get a 1tb ssd drive

Is anyone using a fast hybrid drive with L8

What's the best way to copy stuff from old drive to a new drive

Appreciate any pointers

Thanks

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Comments

Mark Barnes

Would a 2tb hybrid drive be the best way to go

It really depends on a lot of factors — especially the size of the SSD part of the drive (which is surprisingly difficult to find out). Most of them only have 8Gb 'SSD', which is fairly useless for Logos.

What's the best way to copy stuff from old drive to a new drive

Use an app. Your drive will almost certainly come with one (or you can download it from the manufacturer). For example, Samsung's is here: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools/

Lee

I would stay clear away from the hybrid drives. The SSD capacity is usually small = wears out really, really fast.

Prices have fallen. Replace your "first hard drive" with something like a 512GB SSD. Put your programs on that, including Logos.

Use the "second hard drive" for your pure data. You won't look back.

GaoLu

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1035047#Comment_1035047

I stewed on this question, chewed it up, and a recently, without going into details of research, opted for a laptop with a 1 TB SSD which I just bought.

Free rabbit trail: Amazon canceled my order 3X, locking my account. I made multiple phone calls to get the order to go through. After 3 weeks it did!

Small Heath

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1035054#Comment_1035054

I converted 2 desktops with 1T hdd to 1T ssd. I converted a laptop with 512GB to 1T ssd. All 3 run much faster, even though the controllers are SATA 2. I completely removed all 3 hdd. I have a huge Logos library and it indexes in 5 min. or much less. I would install Win. 10, both Logos program and library on a 1T ssd. It saved me from doing a performance upgrade. Make sure you get the partitions formatted correctly with Easeus.

https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager/personal.html

Tong Shin Kai Clarence

Its best to change to an ssd. Ssd really makes logos feels much faster. But even ssd have diferent technologies. If your computer can support it nvme ssd are the fastest.

Kolen Cheung

- Logos' performance will be much better if it is installed on SSD, because Logos is really a big database, i.e. a lot of random IO but usually not throughput. i.e. HDD is close to be useless for this kind of workload. Many USB thumb drives (yes those cheap, small ones) has better random IO performance than spinning HDDs.

- hybrid drive won't help you as others has explained, they often come with only small amount (~8GB) of SSD. The SSD in the hybrid drive is functioned as a cache device, for the most frequently used stuffs to be cached there. It's improvement over plain HDD is for limited use cases, such as people installing the OS and put all their stuffs in the same drive, where the SSD cached the most used OS files (caching algorithm needs to be warmed up too, and depends on vendor.) Analogy: SSD in hybrid drive is like a small desk with a big book shelf. Books are your files. Put all your most used resources on this small desk and you can work pretty quickly. But this small desk is so small once your desk is full, you need to archive your not used books back to the shelf and bring new stuffs from the shelf. With a very small desk and a ton of books to be accesses, the existence of that small desk won't have discernible improvement. What Logos often does is to retrieve a bit of stuffs from a ton of books each, so it's like a lot of books being put on desk first then read a paragraph then move on.

- use some tool to check the directory size of the Logos installation. May be even just right click that directory and see the info. Find out about its size first. From there choose the smallest SSD that can accommodate that volume, provided that you use it as a 2nd drive for Logos 8 as before. If you want everything in your main SSD drive, just try to find out the total volume used by the 2 you already have.

- I'm guessing just for Logos alone, a 120GB SSD would be enough. The question is how you want to upgrade it (keeping it as a 2nd drive or not), and how much other stuffs you'd want to put there.

- You could also consider put some of your big files/directories to a cloud storage platform if that's not frequently accessed, but need to retrieve them easily from time to time. Many cloud storage services has an option for you to selectively sync that directory to your local drive, hence reducing the amount of disk space you need (when leaving the long term archival stuffs on the cloud.) Depending on what subscription you might already be having (such as Office 365), you might already have some / a lot of space somewhere.

And whatever you do, back up is of paramount importance. e.g. once you upgraded you could dedicate your old spinning 1TB HDD for backup only. Backup is for those stuffs you can't retrieved anymore if gone (i.e. Backing up Logos is not needed), and means you have at least 2 independent copies of the same stuffs.

For copying, tons of softwares do this. Drag and drop is easiest but not reliable as interrupting it means restarting it. Personally I use rsync, which is command line only. You could try SyncToy from Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15155, which is free and stable but old (last updated from a decade ago.)

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1035086#Comment_1035086

For copying, tons of softwares do this. Drag and drop is easiest but not reliable as interrupting it means restarting it. Personally I use rsync, which is command line only. You could try SyncToy from Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15155, which is free and stable but old (last updated from a decade ago.)

None of these methods/tools will work to clone the boot/system drive. They're fine to move data from the secondary drive to the system drive. Moving programs is more complicated, of course.

Kolen Cheung

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1035100#Comment_1035100

If one want to clone the drive (and be bootable), it is more difficult to do.

My Personal choice would be Clonezilla. One need to boot from its custom Linux first and follow a very basic GUI interaction. Very easy and robust though.

On Mac there’s 2 very easy to use programs doing this on the fly. Windows users can point out windows counterparts.

(Those I mentioned are free.)

Brother Mark

1. Go SSD vs hybrid for all the reasons everyone has piled on above, and a 1TB SSD is relatively inexpensive. Trust us: buy once, cry once.

2. There is a TREMENDOUS difference in read/write times between SATA and NvME SSD drives. If your laptop has an M.2 NvME slot, buy one of these because they are so much (SO much!) faster than a SATA SSD. If your laptop doesn't have an M.2 NvME capable slot, then a SATA SSD will still provide a significant increase in performance when you migrate your Logos from the mechanical drive to the SSD.

3. There is zero reason to remove the mechanical drive after you've migrated your OS and Logos to the new SSD. Let it remain in your laptop for additional (albeit slower) data storage. Hey, you already own it, and *free* is good.

4. Have a look here for comparisons of SSD types, prices, etc.

5. You may be interested in viewing a video that includes a good description of the differences between SATA and NvME SSD drives. Skip ahead to 20:50 in the video where he begins discussing these differences.

Michael G Parry-Thomas

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1035144#Comment_1035144

Thank you everybody for your information about different drives ,it's been very helpful

Will check my manual to see what type of connecting slots

Can't wait

to get it upgraded

Tong Shin Kai Clarence

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1035290#Comment_1035290

I just want to mention that most hard disk manufacturers provide cloning software to clone the old hard drive to the new ssd. You might need to get the right cables though. I know for a fact that samsung does it with their evo and pro drives.

Kolen Cheung

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1035144#Comment_1035144

A few people has mentioned NVMe vs SATA of SSD, note that:

- it depends on the laptop/motherboard's interface. m.2 or SATA interface? Better if the OP told us the model no. of his laptop first and it will be easier to recommend

- for m.2 interface, sometimes they support PCIe 4x and/or SATA standard. If given choice, PCIe 4x will be superior and the price diff. isn't that much (over SATA.) But note that if it supports SATA standard only one need to buy a m.2 SATA SSD.

- also note the different form factors of m.2 cards, at least 3 of them are common.

- Also note that while theoretically NVMe are better, Logos' workload isn't about throughput but random IO, mostly. So its benefits might not shows up at all for Logos just because it may not even saturate the SATA bus speed that much.

And for cloning, let's wait for the OP to decide what to buy and the plan (i.e. keeping 2 separate drives or combine to 1 SSD, etc.) first. Right now it seems the question is still very open ended and suggestions can becomes too broad.