It started like an ordinary day. I was working on my laptop, connected to the big screen. Everything seemed fine when I turned it off and went for a walk. But then I’ve returned home and pressed the Power button on my laptop. BIOS started checking all the devices there are inside and stopped after it found processor. “That’s unusual” I though at the time and restarted the computer, thinking it was some kind of a bug. But this behavior persisted. The only good thing I could see – it wasn’t frozen, I pressed F2 and got to the BIOS settings screen and there was the answer. There was this word “None” right after “HDD:”. That couldn’t be good. As it turns out, it wasn’t good. That means SSD had died on me. I’ve purchased it more than a year before and it seemed to work just fine. There was just one unusual experience couple of months ago, when it did some kind of reset removing everything. The only difference between that time and yesterday was the price of the new SSD, as in both situations all the data was gone.
The SSD in question was Kingston V300 120GB Solid State Drive. I bought it on recommendation of my friend, who used it in many computers – his, clients and at work and never had a problem. And it was (and still is, as far as I can tell), the cheapest SSD on the market. This time I’ve decided to look at something else, I wasn’t ready to pay a lot more, but about 10 euros premium was fine for me. The other thought I had was upping the capacity to 240GB, but it meant doubling the price, not only the storage. Also, I wasn’t ever hitting the limit on the previous SSD. After looking for what was a very short time, I’ve decided to buy Samsung 840EVO 120GB SSD.
The first thing I’ve noticed was the package. It was much nicer than plastic Kingston one, which you have to battle with scissors. Then I’ve opened the package and got the SSD out, it felt much lighter than the Kingston one. I’ve later checked and it was indeed lighter. SSD by Kingston was 86 grams and Samsung one is 53. It may not seem as a big difference, but I think there is some kind of psychological border. Samsung’s SSD feels like it is a little empty plastic box. Of course, you won’t even notice the difference when you put it inside the laptop, it’s just an unusual feeling getting it out of the box.
There was also CD in the packaging, no idea where to put it as my laptop doesn’t have the drive. I believe everybody should stop putting CDs in the boxes, I know, the cost of including it is almost zero, but it’s pretty much useless.
After I’ve installed the drive, it was time to get the Windows up and running. And that’s whole different story for another post and I’ll leave it for tomorrow, probably.