I ordered a $35 SSD - DREVO X1 PRO 64GB. Not the end game for me, but if it works properly, I imagine it's still loads faster than this 40GB WD HDD, that is about 12yrs old - which simultaneously works fine, is relatively quiet, and is slower than molasses. (click on your browser after initial boot = can you hold?) I get that this SSD is no Samsung, but then I didn't pay Samsung prices for it, either. Nor am I particularly concerned about the longevity of the drive. If it lasts for the duration of its 3yr warranty, I'm probably down with that. If it lasts much longer, I'm especially down with that. The reality is that I just don't have a lot of important files, where if I lose them, I'm devastated. I ordered the SSD from the DREVO Store, which... well, I really didn't quite grasp when I ordered it that it looks to be a Chinese warehouse. I think. Hard to tell. 3-5days to process the order, and 7-20 to ship. Yikes. Should have done better research on that, but I guess I'm not in a hurry. Good thing, huh? I should have ordered it from some domestic seller/retailer.
I've read a couple reviews of this SSD. Well, one was specifically for the 64GB SSD, and I think the other was for the 240GB model. But both of them were largely positive. Not glowing, but like hey, at this price... More or less the gist was "not really a top performer, but solidly built..." The one review they took it apart and looked inside, etc.
Anyway. We'll see how it goes. If it's a mistake, then so be it, I still like to tinker with components and try things and sometimes you win and other times... yeah. Not so much.
So if the SSD ever gets here (it might) and it works (it might!) then maybe I'll get, say, a WD Blue 1TB HDD for storage. Or 2TB. Something. My question for our resident tech gurus is... there's a way to format these two drives, like in tandem, so one's boot and the other's storage, right? Remind me how I do that again? Seems like if I did that, and my SSD was "strickly" system boot, don't you think my SSD might last a while?
Would the HDD still be a drag on the rest of the system?