Was thinking of upgrading my HDD to SSD.

Decided to make a post on Reddit to seek advice. Bloody laptop froze.

Had to kill it and force restart it. Seems like my laptop can read the posts that I am making.

What luck!

Just do it!

Seems like it tries to advice you to upgrade the whole laptop.

@jespersh Mine is more or less 4 year old. A mistake I made was did not go for SSD (lack of research and thoughtfulness while over-analysing all the unnecessary things).

@electrineer Hah! I was thinking of that but it works just fine and I don't foresee that happening unless that is a major physical damage causing laptop malfunction.

@C0D4 Just had this thought. Let's see if I can do it early next year. Nothing urgent or important for now.

I don't think the hangs are related to having an HDD. But it is still better to have your OS and frequently used software on an SSD anyway.

Just get an SSD now!
And don't forget that size actually does matter:
don't go lower than 960 GB.
You can still go cheap - even the slowest SSDs should blow your mind when comming from spinning rust...

@Oktokolo 960 GB would be an overkill for my use case.

All I need to do is put OS in there. Most of my stuff and work is on cloud these days.

@Floydimus
For cloud-only (so not having massive amounts of data, media or games locally), the lowest practical limit probably is 265 GB or even 128 GB if using Linux...
But even in that case i would not go lower than 512 GB because SSDs are damn cheap now and the extra storage benefits wear leveling a lot.

@Oktokolo I am thinking to settle for 256 for now.

I can only imagine Linux running on an SSD.

Also, this was just one thought that crossed my mind (to upgrade), not actively pursuing the upgrade.

Let's see how much free time I get in upcoming months.

@Floydimus
You seem to be a cheap skate always going for the lowest option that technically is still sort of bearable...
So your laptop might have a lowest tier CPU and only 4 GiB RAM - that would still cripple your work experience even with an SSD.
So for the full experience, consider getting a better laptop or upgrading the RAM to 16 GiB too...

@Oktokolo Too quick to judge?

This is for my personal laptop and not work machine.

My work machine is 10X more powerful and just few months old.

The personal one is ~4 years old and I don't use it for work and only purpose it serves to me is for big screen entertainment and excel for certain stuff.

And why do it bother you whether I am a cheapstake or not? Well, I prefer investing my money in other stuff than building a ultra high end laptop.

@Floydimus
For a streaming machine, it shouldn't actually matter whether it has an SSD or spinning rust.

RAM should also not matter in that case.

So: Your CPU is crappy slow or you aren't using uBlock Origin.

@Oktokolo Exactly why I said I am not in a hurry and this was a random idea that I got and decided to do some initial research to understand the landscape.

This weird incident happened so posted here.

No, my CPU is not slow (I have i5 7th Gen) and I am using piHole and uBlock and ton of other extensions.

@Floydimus
Given the CPU i would suggest cleaning the fans and doing a stress test if the problem persists.
That CPU should not freeze when browsing with uBlock.

But as you mentioned lots of extensions, might also want to check that you don't somehow got a bad apple installed.

@Oktokolo this happened for the first time. Quite a conical experience. Lol

But yes, that's a good idea. I can get my machine cleaned because from past one year (on and off), the place I use for office is under heavy renovation so dust has fucked up a lot of my electronics.

Also, most extensions are light and Open source. Seems like dust. Thanks for the idea.

Haha I did this just a few days ago. Shorted the damn mobo 😂

@ScriptCoded damn shit. Did you manage to fix it?

@Floydimus Yes. Or we'll... New parts are on their way 😅 it was actually just half of the memory slots failing, essentially halving my RAM... But hey! Now I'm getting a 5600x!

@Floydimus If thermals are the problem why it's shutting down, then you might also want to repaste it. For laptops, Thermalgrizzly's Hydronaut would be a good choice. Not their Conductonaut, not their Cryonaut, and not Noctua's NT-H1/2.

@ScriptCoded share the photos of the shiny stuff when they arrive.

@Fast-Nop oh it was one time thing that this happened. Never happened earlier.

I'll get it checked at with the local repair guy.

I had an hdd for over 10 years, only problem was when it got to old and stopped writing...
When it died bought a new one...
Lasted 6 months, lukely I had a backup of over 15 years of data in a pen...
Bought a new one.. 3 tb Seagate, lasted a month, meanwhile pen with backup got corrupted...
So, in less than a year 2 brand new hdds died, a 128gb pen that got used 3 times died and lost all that data... Docs, home videos...
Using 2 ssds now, no problem so far...

@GyroGearloose pen drives are notoriously unreliable. Not sure what happened to the new HDDs, maybe they got a vibration treatment from the delivery company.

@electrineer ya... Don't know...
What I know is that I don't trust hdds anymore... And they did work for a few months, to both fail due to mechanical issues... You know, when you hear that tac tac tac...