Warning. This post will be a bit of a ramble.
Recently my backup laptop, a 2013 Lenovo Y580 decided that it would die quietly while in its drawer/coffin. A sad event indeed but with the unit being quite old and outdated, I wasn’t too upset about it kicking buckets. I had already backed up most of the content of my drives other than some 3D files for Solidworks that I had been playing around with. I really should have just let those files die.
Lenovo Y580
Determined at the time to get those files which I had not backed up, I removed the hard drive (HDD) and plugged it into my Razer Blade Stealth. Oh joys onto joys when I found out in my wisdom that I had set my hard drives to encrypt themselves. Nice going past me. What this meant was I couldn’t just pick up the files I wanted as they were basically locked inside the drive. However, I didn’t realize this till much later. Long story short, I somehow in my attempts to mount the partitions in that drive, turned my hard drive on my Razer into a dynamic disk. I wont bore you with the details but basically its not what you want for a basic consumer level ultrabook. What made this fun was that you can’t switch it back to a simple volume without reformatting the drive. Yay.
So cutting another long story short, I reformatted the drive and in doing so, erased the factory restore partition on the disk meaning I couldn’t get back into Windows without reinstalling. I did that but because I reinstalled using a generic version of Windows, my computer lacked the special Razer drivers and software that is needed to for some Razer specific functions to work. Sigh.
The solution? Get someone else to fix it.
Luckly (?) at the time I was in an RMA conversation with Razer regarding a bloating battery so if I send it to them they’ll just replace the battery and restore the drive to factory defaults and all will be hunky dory.
But, the reason this post is titled new computers and SSD’s is because quite simply I am frustrated with using the Stealth as my daily driver for both gaming and work. I usually have it hooked up to a Razer Core X external GPU with a Zotac GTX1080 (yes it bottle-necked) and just unplugged it when I needed to leave the house. This was for the most part a convenient set-up but the problem I had was that the Stealth just couldn’t handle the CPU stresses of heavy prolonged activities. Its Dual Core processor with Quad core virtualization just killed it in terms of thermals. And mind you, I had it docked on a cooling base next to a window in the middle of winter.
The New Razer Blade Stealth
So hot you can cook eggs on the keyboard… Literally.
I decided that I would get rid of this stupid setup. I couldn’t take advantage of the 1080 in the Core because the Thunderbolt connection lacked the bandwidth for effective utilization of the unit. That and the incapability of the Stealth itself to handle loads meant that I would not use it purely as a mobile computing device.
What about my workstation you ask? Well simple my dear Watson. I would just build a Desktop PC in its place! I sold the Razer Core for $275 USD and used that money to buy the components I needed. I had a bunch of extra stuff lying about and I already had the 1080 so I figured I could at the very least get a stable workstation that I could upgrade in the future with $275.
In my parts bin I had a couple of WD Green 2TB hard drives, and the 1080. Ok so it wasn’t really a LOT of stuff but it was a significant savings in terms of cost. I had a monitor and peripherals so that was covered. I made a list on PCPartPicker and came up with the following:
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel - Core i3-8100 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor | $118.99 @ Amazon |
| Motherboard | MSI - B360M BAZOOKA Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard | $81.77 @ OutletPC |
| Memory | Corsair - Vengeance LPX 8 GB (1 x 8 GB) DDR4-2400 Memory | $46.99 @ Newegg |
| Power Supply | Corsair - CX (2017) 450 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply | $19.99 @ Newegg |
| Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts | ||
| Total (before mail-in rebates) | $287.74 | |
| Mail-in rebates | -$20.00 | |
| Total | $267.74 | |
| Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-02-28 02:24 EST-0500 |
New SSD!
In total it came out to about $300 when factoring in a case as well. I saved some money buying a refurbished motherboard instead of new so I put those savings into buying and SSD. Originally I was going to use a mini-SATA drive that I salvaged from my y580 that died to use as a boot drive. But with a capacity of only 64gb. installing much more besides Windows was gonna be hard. Using a proper SSD with the mSATA drive as an accelerator drive would be much better in terms of performance.
The SSD I got was a Pioneer 240gb 3D Nand drive off Amazon. I was debating between this and Kingston A400 but the Pioneer was slightly cheaper and looked nicer. Very important things when choosing an SSD (not). The i3 8100 wasn’t the best value for money but the i5 I was eyeing was an extra $60 and its not really something I can afford right now.
I had already set up my computer on the HDD so the was was to just copy everything over. So I cloned the HDD to the SSD using Macarium and everything was good.
Until it wasn’t.
The SSD initially booted fine and worked amazingly. So I naturally did some setup in the BIOS reordering the boot drives, and then proceeded to use a Windows Installation drive to wipe the old HDD. And for some inexplicable reason doing this made the Windows clone on the SSD just not work. Repairing startup using a repair disk didn’t work and nothing else I tried worked. Sigh. Things just wont work will they.
So I YOLO'ed it and just reinstalled Windows, then reinstalled all the drivers (again), re-downloaded all my core apps (again), and then logged into all the things I needed to log into (again). So now everything works as intended and the difference was amazing. When I installed Windows on the HDD and used it for a while boot times were stellar at 32 seconds to get to the Windows log-in screen. After installing the SSD, the boot times dropped down to <10 seconds on initial boot and after rebooting and optimizing the drive, down to <5 seconds.
What is the point of this long rambling story? Back up your data. And don’t mess with things you don’t know. All in all, I’m glad I got rid of the Core and built this computer instead. The Core is seriously an overpriced luxury and is barely worth the convenience of having one computer for work and play. Spending the same amount on a proper desktop yielded far better results and could have saved my Stealth from ballooning its battery.