SSD feedback
 

Hello all!

I am thinking about replacing my laptop's HDD (250GB, 5400 RPM) with a solid-state-drive. I have had my laptop for about 3 years now, still happy, but sometimes annoyed how long it takes to power up (I defrag on a regular basis). :suspect:

Anybody here who upgraded their laptop with a SSD and can share the experience? Is SSD significantly faster and does it stay faster over time? Anything to watch out for with Vista? :rolleyes:

Thanks,

7 7 7 7

http://www.pprune.org/search.php?searchid=8053451

EDIT: Sorry, it worked fine when I posted but it seems like the searchengine has a short memory. Anyway, the tread got rolling.

"Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."

Yeah. Instead of wasting your time mulling over SSD vs traditional, how about trashing Vista and installing Windows 7 first.

Traditional technology is mature, well developed and remains in common use. I don't use SSD on any of my machines, I push them hard, and I don't see a performance issue. Similarly, 99.99% of server deployments still use traditional technology because SSD=$$$.

SSD is not the solution to all problems, and infact if your computer is slow under traditional, you're unlikely to see major performance boosts from SSD.

SSD should be seen as a "tweak" rather than a first step. There's plenty you can do beyond defragging to ensure your computer is running at its best.

I've had an SSD in 2 of my laptops for a couple of years now.

Whilst they're considerably quicker than a standard HDD, there is one massive downside which has bitten me in the bum twice: If you lose your boot sector info, you lose ALL data on the rest of the SSD and there's NO getting it back.

(and yes, I did have backups for most things, but finding that the SSD firmware was incompatible with my Dell Latitude E6500's hibernate function at 2am whilst waiting for a remote server rebuild to complete was not my idea of fun....having the SSD wipe itself and having to reinstall Win7 asap in order to complete the server rebuild before the users came in in the morning was a bit hairy to say the least).

For the less than totally computer....
 

....literate.
Mixture, could you please enumerate the "plenty of other things beyond defragging" in language that doesn't need a further raft of supplementary questions.
This BTW is a genuine request, not extracting the yurine.

The Ancient Mariner

Rossian,

No worries. Probably not a bad thing to do anyway.

Feeling a bit hot and flustered at the moment (due to the weekend's unseasonal weather, not forum activity !). So when the temperature drops a bit over the next few days, I'll come back and update you.

Best thing short of an SSD (if you don't mind the increased heat going through your trouser vegetables) is to swap the 5400rpm drive for a 7200rpm drive.

Cobblers... I recently changed the 5400rpm drive in my wife's 4yr old MacBook Pro for an SSD and it went like stink. Boot time reduced by 75%, applications open almost instantly. For non-power users who don't spank the CPU/RAM all the time and require huge amounts of storage space an SSD is the most cost-effective way to bring an older laptop back to life. It easily surpassed current MacBook Pro models with traditional hard discs in terms of day to day performance. All this despite the fact that the MBP SATA controller is limited to SATA1 speeds.

If the SSD is a little too pricey, don't bother with 7200rpm. Look at the 10,000rpm VelociRaptor drives, or the Momentus XT combo drives; both destroy conventional 7200rpm discs and you can have 500GB for well under a ton.

You also have to balance the thermal requirements of a faster drive. 10krpm drives run pretty damn hot.

Logitech Comfort Lapdesk

Was given one for Christmas, great piece of kit !

I have installed SSDs in two Thinkpad x60s laptops, one ls800 tablet, and two 3GHz desktops.

On all of these, there is a huge speedup on all disk read operations - of the order of 3x to 5x. Especially on some programs which load complicated databases. Jepp Flitestar is one example.

There is also a 2x to 3x speedup in booting time.

You also don't need degragmentation so that is one less thing to bother with :ok:

Altitude operation is obviously improved. A normal HD crashes reliably around FL130-140 if unpressurised.

Obviously a SSD is far more robust. On laptops which have shock protection for the HD, you can uninstall that bit of software, which stops HD accesses while the thing is being carried around.

Power consumption is also much lower, though not much effect on battery life on laptops due to most of it being due to the backlight. I see maybe a 25% improvement on the Thinkpads or the ls800.

As regards reliability, probably not much in it. I have chucked out a fair number of hard drives over the years, usually losing all data on ones which actually failed (rather than just got noisy). I also chucked away one 128GB SSD the other day, which get very hard to boot up, with a suspected temperature dependence.

I have considered it before, but I couldn't see myself spending money on a new OS. With Win 8 "around" the corner, I may skip an OS before I upgrade.

One more question from a "low tech" computer user: I assume that the most limiting part (in terms of speed) of my hard drive system with an SSD might be the ATA controller. Device manager currently shows two controllers:

* Intel(R) ICH8M 3 port Serial ATA Storage Controller - 2828
* Intel(R) ICH8M Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 2850

What the fastest SSD I could install with these controllers? SATA I, II or even III?

Thanks for all your replies. :ok:

Cheers,

7 7 7 7

I'm sure someone with deeper knowledge than me will step in, but from dim memory, your SATA chip will support SATA-II. However, many manufacturers limit it to SATA-I. I'd guess this would be for many reasons, including support chip specs and motherboard design.

The big win with SSD for many people isn't the absolute increase in the speed at which data is pulled off the drive, it's the absence of seek time.

Your problem is that Vista doesn't support the TRIM command, which is pretty important when getting the best speed out of an SSD. A couple of brands are very poor with Vista.

Slow boot times can be down to timeouts in badly-written USB drivers: "gee, I seem to remember this scanner from last time, let's wait 20 seconds in case it reappears".

A lot of things are "very poor with Vista" :E

Hence most people will tell you Windows 7 is what Vista should have been.

Yes...and no.

Windows 7 is definitely what Vista should have been, but Vista suffered greatly by poor initial perception.

It is inherently the same underlying codebase as 7, but unfortunately for Microsoft when they gave it to the User Acceptance Testing group they had obviously outsourced it to India or something, as it got signoff without thought.

This led to the early adopters saying: "I was waiting so patiently for Vista and thought it was going to be the next best thing, but it annoyed me"

...which led to the mainstream saying: "It's a POS, avoid" (mainly from those who hadn't really used it to any great extent)

However, run the same code, with tweaks to remove/dampen-down UAC, etc, through a proper UAT process, and you come up with Windows 7....which is what they did.

Vista in itself isn't inherently poor, it's just that the good bits are masked by what's bad about it (as per the above).

Mike-Bracknell,

Ok, you can be teacher's pet for the day.

:E