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The year is 2016, and in my many Youtube adventures, I remember finding a channel called Druaga1. For those who do not know, he was (was, because it seems he abandoned YouTube without any trace) a guy that would make tech videos about old and retro tech, installing weird, wacky OSes to random computers, as well as just generally fucking around with older computers as a whole. If the name Druaga rings a bell, he was the guy that made the video titled Can the Windows 98 Machine Handle Minecraft?, a video where he pretty much gets Minecraft running inside a Windows 98 computer and if I remember, it ran somewhat decently all things considered.
I think my favorite videos of his was the “installing a SSD inside a
blank”, which was a long ongoing series. He would install a
bunch of SSDs inside a bunch of computers, including but not limited to:
classic Macs, pre-2000s PCs, random laptops, his main PC, computers from
the mid-2000s, and a long long list of hardware that had their spinning
crappy drive replaced with a shiny new SSD. There was something awesome
witnessing a computer boot up in less than 30 seconds, something awesome
about not having to wait a couple minutes until the operating system
finally catches up. Yet it was also interesting to see that sometimes,
SSDs don’t work on certain computers, like the PowerMac G5, which
apparently has issues on any SSD that isn’t SATA 1, for some reason.
Seeing all thee videos really made me want to get into computers more,
to build a PC of my own, and to just collect random computers for my own
amusement. Most importantly, I really really wanted to get an SDD and
install it to my crappy PC at the time. I was very fucking tired of
waiting 2 minutes for my PC to boot up, and then wait an additional 5
minutes until the OS got stable enough to do shit with it.
But sadly, I didn’t have money, and my parents were unwilling to provide any money towards a new computer or for any computer parts. Which meant anything I wanted must be purchased with my own money. And SSDs used to be expensive, especially back in 2016. I wondered for years how better my PC would’ve been, if only it had an SSD. Because frankly, Windows 10 on a hard drive was borderline unusable. 5 minute boot times, very slow access times, turning my computer was a 10 minute process, where it took 3 minutes to boot and get to the desktop, and then 7 minutes for the system to stabilize and for the post-boot background processes to end.
As I upgraded from my crappy 2007 era laptop, to my 2006-era HP tower, to a 2013 Dell Latitude laptop, I kept wanting to get an SSD. I did upgrade the RAM on said laptop, since 4GB was very unusable on Windows 10, but I never upgraded to an SSD for some reason. They were still too expensive for a dumbass like myself to buy, and I didn’t know what I was looking for in an SSD. I thought all SSDs were created equal, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Anyways, I never really ended up upgrading the hard drive on this laptop, and once COVID hit, and online classes were starting to go and take shape, a relative offered me to buy a computer and send it to me.
I was so fucking excited when I heard this. I would finally get my own computer, where I would be able to play my own games and such. I got a shitty summer job and got myself a used GTX 780 GPU, a Gigabyte P650B power supply, and a 24 pin to 8 pin adapter for the motherboard (because this gen of Dell PCs had a proprietary power supply). Yet for some reason, it never crossed my mind to get an SSD, and looking back to it now, wouldn’t it be a great idea, all things considering? My experience in Windows was honestly god awful on this PC. Constant freezing and generally being slow, and it got to the point that I decided to get a damn SSD.
So I find myself a PNY CS900 SSD being sold on Facebook Marketplace, and like, I decide to buy it. And I installed it, got a fresh copy of Windows running, and oh my god was it a night and day difference. I never saw Windows boot that fast before, and I was up and running with a usable PC in less than a minute or so. And sure, that PNY SSD is probably not that great, but it lasted me all these years, with the original drive still kicking around in the same computer it first saw use. And then, when I first built my PC, the SSD i used was of course yet another PNY SSD.
Yet I was pretty unsatisfied with my storage at the time. I had a 2TB hard drive die on me and that made me pretty weary against anything in hard drive form. And sure, the cause of death was most likely a 500 km road trip where I took the PC with me, and left the hard drive installed inside the PC, but it was still devastating. I was in storage hell for a whole year, until I finally made a great upgrade. So now my PC has a NVME SSD as its boot drive, another NVME for storage, and another SATA SSD for more storage. I finally managed to quench the need for storage.
I think back at those times when I was wanting to upgrade to an SSD when I was younger and I am pretty thankful I was able to upgrade my PC to the point I don’t even use spinning media much anymore. And I think it is sad that are about to come full circle: the current obsession with AI has significantly increased the price of RAM, and in turn, will certainly increase the price of SSDs to the same insane amounts that we’ve seen in RAM kits. Kingston is even literally warning customers to upgrade right now, since the storage components are about to skyrocket in the same way RAM was affected. And so we go back to SSDs being unobtanium once again, going back to being expensive luxury items. But hey, at least Windows 11 runs good on hard drives, right? Right?
Fucking hell.
updates:
2025-12-20: page was created.