I also noticed that Windows 7 had lost it’s recollection of ever checking for Windows and Microsoft Updates, but asking it to check for updates fixed that issue. Windows 7 booted up without any problems, although it wanted a reboot once it realized that the drive had been changed. If you are cloning/upgrading a drive in a laptop, you pretty much have to use a USB port to do it.Īfter the cloning process was complete, I shut down the system and swapped the drives. I could have shut down the system, and plugged the new Samsung drive into a native SATA III port to get better copy performance, but I was too lazy to do that… As it was, I was seeing about 125MB/sec during the cloning copy process, which was fast enough. I used an Apricorn SATA Wire 3.0 plugged into a front-panel USB 3.0 port to connect the new Samsung drive for the cloning process. I used the free Samsung Data Migration software (which only works with Samsung SSDs as the cloning target) to clone the old OCZ drive to the new Samsung drive. The results are shown in Figure 1.įigure 1: 512GB OCZ Vertex 4 SATA III SSD Benchmark results It is pretty amazing to get double the size (and better performance) at less than half the price, compared to what was available back in 2012.īefore I cloned the existing drive, I ran CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 on it with a 4GB test file. The 850 EVO line has been around for about a year now, and prices have come down quite a bit since they were introduced. I ended up getting a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO SATA III SSD, for $329.99 at my local Micro Center.
It was getting a little low on disk space though, so I decided it was time for an upgrade to a larger, faster SSD.
This drive has soldiered on for over three and a half years, with no problems. Back then, this was arguably the fastest consumer SSD available, with an MSRP of $699.99.
Back in April of 2012, I built an Intel Z77 workstation that used a 512GB OCZ Vertex 4 SATA III SSD, plugged into a SATA III port for it’s Windows 7 boot drive.