All posts tagged: SSD

This one Windows power setting will make your NVMe SSD even more snappier

Published by skeptic

I recently switched to a WD Black M.2 SSD as the primary drive on my gaming PC. I was using an HDD earlier, so, of course, I expected a lot of performance gains and faster load times on my video games. That happened. However, I began noticing delays and brief stutters in daily usage, as well as random freezes when launching video games. It wasn’t constant, but enough to make me look deeper and figure out why it was happening. The culprit behind the stutters was a power setting that resulted in the SSD napping on the job, or more accurately, napping in-between jobs, A Windows power-saving feature is the culprit With great power saving comes great latency Over the years, it’s become tricky to find a sweet spot between battery life and performance on Windows PCs. It’s because Microsoft has aggressively dialed up Windows’ power-saving features. While this has its advantages: you spend less on electricity, and laptops have better battery life, it does cause performance issues that discerning users will easily notice. By …

Best Buy is selling this 2TB Corsair SSD for over 60% off

Published by skeptic

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. The Corsair EX400U is an excellent, compact and portable external SSD for gamers, creative professionals, and mobile users. With 2TB of space, you’ll have plenty of storage for large program downloads, raw video files, photos, and more. And right now at Best Buy, you can pick one up for 62% off, bringing the price down to just $330 – one of the best external SSD discounts I’ve seen in a long time. Also: The best M.2 SSDs The EX400U connects to your Apple devices via USB-C and Thunderbolt 4 for blazing fast file transfers. You’ll get read and write speeds up to 4,000 and 3,600 MB/s, respectively, for quicker offloading when you need to make room on your main storage drive. With plug-and-play compatibility, you can quickly and easily swap between your iMac, MacBook, and iPad when you need to change up your workflow. And with MagSafe, you can also use it with your iPhone for on-the-go content creation like vlogging and convention coverage. Also: SSD vs. …

Best Buy is selling this 4TB WD Black SSD for 65% off right now – and I’m seriously tempted

Published by skeptic

WD/ZDNET The WD Black SN850X is an M.2 SSD designed for laptops and desktops, and if you’ve been avoiding upgrading your PC due to high SSD costs, now is the perfect time to buy. Right now at Best Buy, you cansave 65% on the 4TB model, bringing the price to $600. That’s a discount of over $1,100, bringing the cost closer to pre-AI pricing. Also: The best M.2 SSDs you can buy Don’t need that much storage space, or do you need more? The SN850X is also available in 1TB, 2TB, and 8TB capacities, each with its own steep discount, so you can choose the version that best suits your needs now and gives you room to grow. Each version features read and write speeds of 7300 and 6600 MB/s, respectively, giving you much faster loading times in games, quicker app launches, and easier access to your most-used files. Also: SSD vs. HDD The WD Black SN850X is tailor-made for premium gaming, featuring predictive loading to keep the most-used assets ready for faster load times. …

Windows has been hoarding old drivers on your SSD — here’s how to clear them out

Published by skeptic

After using your Windows computer for a year, you may be surprised to learn that there is a file hidden deep within the system drive that has been filling up from the very day you installed Windows. You don’t see it in Windows’ storage breakdown, and clean-up tools don’t flag it. It could hold several gigabytes of driver files that the computer no longer needs, and it’s typically even worse on gaming PCs, where you make more frequent driver updates. It’s just how Windows was designed. However, you don’t have to live with this baggage. Windows keeps every driver you’ve ever installed It’s a safety net — but it never cleans up after itself Afam Onyimadu / MUO Your graphics card, audio chip, network adapter, printer, and every other piece of hardware on your computer needs a driver, and the drivers for all of them are stored in the DriverStore, a protected system folder. This is where Windows looks to pull previous versions of drivers when a driver update goes wrong, without needing an internet …

I drove a bulldozer over this SSD enclosure so you don’t have to – here’s the result

Published by skeptic

Terramaster D1 Portable SSD Enclosure pros and cons Pros Great “add your own SSD” solution. Fast (assuming you pick a fast drive!). Super rugged construction. Cons Only takes 2280 M.2 NVMe drives. The tiny USB-C cover will certainly get lost. Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. As solid-state drives (SSDs) slowly replace traditional hard drives’ spinning platters, portable data storage has become far more reliable. I remember the days of lugging hard drives outdoors where they were prone to getting bashed around, exposed to dirt, water, and all sorts of grime. All it took was one unfortunate spill or knock to render your storage useless and throw a huge wrench into an otherwise smooth day. Also: I tested DJI’s tiny 4K action camera for weeks – and now I’m ditching my GoPro for it What I would have given back then for storage that had no moving parts, wouldn’t break when knocked around, and could be housed in an enclosure that’s practically bombproof. Enter: the Terramaster D1, a portable SSD enclosure that delivers …

Your SSD is slowing down, and Windows has been quietly hiding the fix

Published by skeptic

It’s hard to associate slowness with an SSD. But over time, your new SSD will slow down, causing longer boot times, poor file transfer speeds, and weak benchmark results. It’s tempting to write this off as the drive wearing out or the usual cost of running Windows for a few years. While those do play a part, there’s another reason your SSD is slowing down, and it has nothing to do with age. Windows ships with a maintenance job that’s supposed to run on its own and optimize your SSD for the best performance, and on a healthy system, it works. However, it can silently stop running after an update or driver change, and nothing in Windows will tell you it’s been broken, causing degraded SSD performance. SSDs slow down as they fill up The cache shrinks when free space runs out Credit: Gavin Phillips / MakeUseOf Most consumer SSDs use TLC flash, which stores three bits per cell. But TLC is slow to write to directly, so the controller sets aside a chunk of empty …

I found 50GB of ghost files on my SSD — this is where they were hiding

Published by skeptic

If you’ve been seeing your C: drive shrinking on its own, you’re not going crazy. Windows and its programs love to set up folders and start filling a cache of data that eats up space like anything on your drive. The worst part? Getting rid of this data isn’t as simple as selecting it and hitting delete. Windows itself can hold back as much as 7 GB on your SSD, but these so-called ghost files created by installed programs on your PC are much worse. Thankfully, with a free tool and some cautious deletion, you can chase these ghosts straight out of Windows. Related You don’t need a bigger SSD if you do this with your storage Free up SSD space without spending a dime. Visualizing storage to uncover what Windows hides Windows’ built-in File Explorer is nowhere near as effective if you’re looking to find hidden files. In this case, using a tool like WizTree makes more sense. It’s a free disk analyzer for Windows that’s embarrassingly fast compared to File Explorer. Instead of …

3 scenarios where I’d pick an HDD over an SSD every time

Published by skeptic

Solid-state drives are faster, quieter, and more power-efficient than hard disk drives. In most situations, choosing an SSD is the obvious call. But there are still a handful of cases where HDDs make more sense — not because of nostalgia, or because they’re “good enough,” but because they’re the better tool for the job. You need a lot of storage, and you don’t want to spend a lot of money Storage cost efficiency Storage pricing has shifted dramatically in favor of SSDs over the past few years. But HDDs still hold a significant cost-per-gigabyte advantage at high capacities, and that gap matters when you’re buying in bulk. A 4TB HDD will set you back around $80-120. A 4TB SSD will cost you at least four times that at the time of writing, if not more. If you’re building a home NAS or media center and you need more than a single drive, your overall cost will quickly climb into the multiple thousands with SSDs. The type of data you’re storing does need consideration; long-term data …

Chrome was writing a lot more to my SSD than I thought — I fixed it

Published by skeptic

I decided to pay more attention to my SSD after observing constant spikes in disk activity, even when I wasn’t performing any intensive tasks. I looked through the Resource Monitor app, and I saw Chrome writing to my disk. Even though these were not big bursts, they were happening with barely any pause. It became obvious that, in addition to storing cache files, Chrome was ceaselessly updating in the background. When I poked deeper, I realized a few simple steps can keep Chrome in check and seriously reduce the number of writes it makes. OS Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS/iPadOS, ChromeOS Developer Google LLC Price model Free Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google LLC, built for speed, security, and integration with Google services. It uses the Blink rendering engine (formerly WebKit) and supports extensions, tab sandboxing, synchronization across devices, and frequent updates. Chrome writes to your SSD more often than you’d expect The cache isn’t static—it’s constantly being updated Like many people, I thought that my browser cache only gets stored …

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All posts tagged: SSD

This one Windows power setting will make your NVMe SSD even more snappier

Best Buy is selling this 2TB Corsair SSD for over 60% off

Best Buy is selling this 4TB WD Black SSD for 65% off right now – and I’m seriously tempted

Windows has been hoarding old drivers on your SSD — here’s how to clear them out

I drove a bulldozer over this SSD enclosure so you don’t have to – here’s the result

Your SSD is slowing down, and Windows has been quietly hiding the fix

I found 50GB of ghost files on my SSD — this is where they were hiding

3 scenarios where I’d pick an HDD over an SSD every time

Chrome was writing a lot more to my SSD than I thought — I fixed it