By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Zkuq said:
Bofferbrauer2 said:

One question to you guys:

My secondary SSD in my laptop is dying. Well, maybe not dying, but slowing down to the point of blocking the entire PC, even things that are only on the system drive get affected by the slowdown. And with slowing down, I mean, without any exaggeration, Floppy Disc speeds, where it gets pings of over a couple seconds for chunks of data that are less than 100kB in size.

I bought a new one to replace it (2TB WD Black SN770, which I got for 114€ on Cyber Monday), but my question is: Should I simply take out the old one and replace it with the new one or should I try and delete everything from the old drive first (or even reformat it) before exchanging the drives? So far in 30 years, this is the first time a secondary storage drive died on me, so I'm not quite sure how to proceed on this one.

Do you happen to be using disk encryption? If so, I bet you can just lose the password for good and be done with it, although don't quote me on that. If that's not the case, it probably depends a bit on how valuable data you have there. If you do, you might want to run some data erasure software, because simply reformatting isn't a reliable way to ensure no one can access your data. Some would probably speak about a threat model, which would dictate how you should handle the situation. It's probably overkill, but the point still stands: what you should do probably depends on things (but the chances are that there's no need for you to be too paranoid).

Valuable data has been dealt with beforehand. Thankfully it wasn't a lot because due to the extremely slow speeds as explained above, it still took several days for the couple GB it was in total! Hence why I didn't update on the greatest game list - just opening the freaking .odt file with my game list and prepared hints was too much for the drive, but I managed to transfer it now.

What's left is mostly just videogames, and programming software and frameworks, plus LibreOffice (but not it's tables and documents, those are safe), all stuff I should be able to re-download