Disklavier

Using the instructions from kenruda and Hort0922, I made the solid state drive (SSD) mod this weekend, and everything works.  I used a Transcend 128 GB IDE SSD from newegg.com, and a StarTech drive mounting bay kit from Amazon, copied the old drive data to the SSD with Linux, then expanded the data partition to use the entire drive.  Bootup is much faster and I don't hear the hard drive grinding as it searches for sectors any more  -- but the best thing is that I don't have to worry about a hard drive failure.  The most time-consuming part of the mod was labeling all the connectors in the I/O center so I'd be sure to get them all back in the right place.

128 GB is the largest IDE SSD I could find.  I could have used a SATA drive for even more space, but this would have required an adapter, and I wanted to keep the mod as simple as possible.  The new drive adds about 41 GB of storage which is more than enough.  Total cost was about $175.

George

people seem to think that SSDs are the answer to every computer problem. 
they are fast quiet and last forever. well they don't last forever and 
given inappropriate treatment, they can have much shorter lives than one 
would hope. improvements have been made in durability of flash memory 
and sophisticated "wear leveling" and error correction can make an SSD 
seem like it should last forever. in something like a Mac Book Air, all 
is probably done very well in terms of memory management and my guess is 
that the SSD will last as long as the average Mac user would want to 
keep the computer anyway. Flash memory has to be written in blocks so 
every time you change a single bit, you need to re-write the whole 
block. Clever buffering and and caching in system memory can minimize 
the number of writes. In a system where the use of an SSD was never 
considered, it is possible that many more write cycles will occur than 
if it was. Flash memory only has something like 1,000,000 reliable write 
cycles and as large as this number sounds, very bad memory management 
can wipe out your memory. Hopefully, in a DKV, writing will not be 
overdone and the SSD will last almost forever unless it fails from some 
other electronic problem other than flash memory failure. There is a lot 
going on in one of these drives to make them work so there is always the 
chance of failure.
> On 27 July 2013 20:27, gelsycycle <georgeall@... 
> <mailto:georgeall@...>> wrote:
>
>      Bootup is much faster and I don't hear the hard drive grinding as
>     it searches for sectors any more  -- but the best thing is that I
>     don't have to worry about a hard drive failure. 
>
>
> Glad your upgrade went well (makes me even more jealous of you Mk4 
> owners!). Just be warned that SSDs can, and do, fail just as hard 
> drives do (although it is usually in cases where there is a lot of 
> writing going on, especially if the SSD is almost at capacity).
>
> Regards,
>
> James
>
> 

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