When I found a 240GB Western Digital SSD for what seemed to be a ridiculously low price compared with the prices I was used to seeing, I grabbed one. I planned to use it in my Gigabyte BRIX, but decided I would stick with the 500GB HDD because I tend to use a lot of space on the Brix.
But then in April 2017 Raspberry Pi 3 was modified with the ability to do a one time write to the system and enable booting from an external USB device instead of micro SD. I ran the configuration change and set up the Pi 3B+ to boot and run from the 240GB SSD, and it worked perfectly. I've been using the Pi on the SSD ever since.
a few weeks ago I saw a 500GB Crucial brand SSD again really cheap compared with the previous prices - and grabbed one for the Brix. It too some fiddling to clone the 500GB HDD to the SSD successfully (had to rn CloneZilla several times) but eventually I got it booting.
The difference on the Pi was noticeable, so I homed to reduce my boot times for Mint 19 PLASMA on the Brix from almost 3 minutes to something more like a normal distro.
I ended up with around about 1 minute to boot. But program start times have been reduced by a similar margin.
The difference running from SSD is significant. Is it worth the dollars? In my opinion - Yes.
Should I have changed to SSD sooner? I don;t think so. Not at the old SSD prices.
In fact if I wasn;t now running Plasma 5 on Mint 19 on the Brix, I don't think I would have bothered. But Plasma 5 is just so gluggish after Mint 17KDE that I felt like I was back on an old 386 system trying to run Windows 95. With the SSD, Plasma 5 is bearable. I have no idea how the Plasma team managed to put MORE stuff into the environment, and make it so slow and awkward after the lovely snappy Plasma 4 they had. Hopefully some time, they will get Plasma 5 fixed - but until then, at least running from an SSD it is usable.
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