Intel SSD in may laptop

xy16644 · 20 Feb 2010 at 15:26

Hello All!

I am wanting to buy the following drive:

Intel X25-M Mainstream 160GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive

I currently have a Samsung R710 laptop. Will this Intel SSD drive fit/work correctly in my laptop?

Thanks for any help!!

King Arthur · 20 Feb 2010 at 17:11

Yes, but according to the specs its only a SATA I controller, where as to take full advantage of the SSD you need a SATA II as it has increased speed support.

It will work, but just not as fast its meant to i dont think.

Phil

weird_dave · 20 Feb 2010 at 18:38

I think it'll still be a huge improvement due to small file seek times.

wakayoda · 20 Feb 2010 at 18:48

I would not recommend this

fishfishfish · 20 Feb 2010 at 19:05

I did this with my Dell XPS M1330 and the 80GB X25-M. It absolutely flies. Boot time is about 7 seconds!

xy16644 · 20 Feb 2010 at 21:21

Thanks everyone.

wakayoda, why don't you recommend this?

Does it matter that I "only" have SATA I?

Subliminal Aura · 20 Feb 2010 at 21:53

wakayoda said:
I would not recommend this

Why ?

Zarf · 20 Feb 2010 at 22:01

Thanks to SATA1 you're losing a fair bit of potential there, so if money is an issue it'd be worth looking at a cheaper drive.
The 128GB m225 at £283 might be ok for you, unless you need more capacity. Have you considered getting just a 32 or 40GB SSD for your OS and apps and then using an external 2.5" drive for whatever bulk media you're planning to carry?

Still, even limited to SATA1 it's a major upgrade and you'll get rid of any annoying slowdowns on your laptop.

Subliminal Aura · 20 Feb 2010 at 22:11

I'm going to roll my eyes again. :rolleyes:

Get the superior random read/writes on X25-m which is more beneficial especially on a laptop. The peak random read/writes are still way under the SATA-I (187MB/s ?) threshold so you'll be able to fully benefit from the X25-m.

However if you want to take the advice of people who grade SSDs by reading sequential read/write benchmarks then you might as well not buy an SSD at all, simply buy a mechanical and transfer large files from your laptop to another machine all day long.

xy16644 · 20 Feb 2010 at 22:12

Zarf said:
Thanks to SATA1 you're losing a fair bit of potential there, so if money is an issue it'd be worth looking at a cheaper drive.
The 128GB m225 at £283 might be ok for you, unless you need more capacity. Have you considered getting just a 32 or 40GB SSD for your OS and apps and then using an external 2.5" drive for whatever bulk media you're planning to carry?

Still, even limited to SATA1 it's a major upgrade and you'll get rid of any annoying slowdowns on your laptop.

Am I really going to notice a difference in performance between SATA I and II? It reminds me of the days when everyone had IDE Ultra 66 and then Ultra 100 came out but there was little (if any) difference as it was all theoretical and the drive could never match the speed of the interface! Or is SSD different in that the speed of the interface DOES matter?

I currently do use an external USB drive for all my data but what I was hoping on doing is buying a nice SSD drive now, use it in my laptop for a few months before building my own custom PC (where I would use this Intel SSD drive).

Deleted member 77746 · 20 Feb 2010 at 22:31

you don't need massive capacity in primary drives these days as a lot of data should be away from the systems themselves. Gettin an SSD will be a huge increase and you will notice it. If you have the money then why not especially when your going to put it into a desktop in few months anyway.

Zarf · 20 Feb 2010 at 22:50

xy16644 said:
Am I really going to notice a difference in performance between SATA I and II? It reminds me of the days when everyone had IDE Ultra 66 and then Ultra 100 came out but there was little (if any) difference as it was all theoretical and the drive could never match the speed of the interface! Or is SSD different in that the speed of the interface DOES matter?

I currently do use an external USB drive for all my data but what I was hoping on doing is buying a nice SSD drive now, use it in my laptop for a few months before building my own custom PC (where I would use this Intel SSD drive).

That sounds like a good idea to me, though after using it in your laptop you probably won't want to go back to your old drive

Unlike the Ultra 100 days, SSD's like the Intel are capable of around 250MB/s on SATA2, in practice SATA1 throughput will limit that to around 130MB/s.

However if you want to take the advice of people who grade SSDs by reading sequential read/write benchmarks then you might as well not buy an SSD at all, simply buy a mechanical and transfer large files from your laptop to another machine all day long.

No need for snarkiness. 4k performance is important, but it's not the be-all and end-all of how your PC operates. There are still a lot of sequential operations and being limited to SATA1 will definitely be noticable.

xy16644 · 20 Feb 2010 at 23:12

So what do I need guys?? Is it worth me replacing my existing 320GB SATA Western Digital Scorpio drive with the Intel I have mentioned?

Is the SATA I limitation really going to be an issue for use in my laptop? Is there going to be a HUGE increase in performance because thats what I am looking for!! ;-)

Subliminal Aura · 21 Feb 2010 at 01:29

Zarf said:
Unlike the Ultra 100 days, SSD's like the Intel are capable of around 250MB/s on SATA2, in practice SATA1 throughput will limit that to around 130MB/s.

No need for snarkiness. 4k performance is important, but it's not the be-all and end-all of how your PC operates.

Well, look, instead of pulling figures out of the air why not just do the maths ?
1500/8 = what ? Still blame me for being 'snarky' ? :rolleyes:

This guy seems to agree with me ...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=3975080&postcount=3

Zarf said:
There are still a lot of sequential operations and being limited to SATA1 will definitely be noticable.

When exactly ?

xy16644 said:
Is the SATA I limitation really going to be an issue for use in my laptop? Is there going to be a HUGE increase in performance because thats what I am looking for!!

Without a doubt you'll notice a huge increase. Personally I'm not a huge fan of SSDs as I don't like the maintence involved but if you go for the 160gig X25-m keeping 50% free and ensuring that you don't overdo large amounts of writes to it (eg downloading needless stuff/torrents etc) then you'll be overwhelmed

Subliminal Aura · 21 Feb 2010 at 01:40

OK I've had a poke around some more.

You'll find this thread invaluable

http://communities.intel.com/thread/9812;jsessionid=5328108A8C844A733357EE1D98AE2D2E.node5COMS

Interestingly there is a SATA overhead to be accounted for that implies the theoretical 187MB/s is not achievable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#SATA_Revision_1.0_.28SATA_1.5Gb.2Fs.29

Even then I still like the X25-m

xy16644 · 21 Feb 2010 at 09:49

I just ran CrystakMark on my laptop and I got the following results on my laptop:

read write
Seq: 45 46
512k 17 30
4k 0.270 1.227

So I'm guessing I'll see a MASSIVE performance boost with the SSD drive even on a SATA I interface?!

I also ran CrystalDiskInfo:

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?e9e89c7edd.jpg

Check out the area in the red rectangle box...its says transfer mode is SATA/300!!! Does this mean I have SATA II and it'll help me get the most out of the Intel SSD drive? :cool:

weird_dave · 21 Feb 2010 at 13:11

Yes, you will see a huge performance increase. If you don't have much junk loading at startup, expect 10 second boot times (after POST). I'd quite like SSD in my laptop, but it's old IDE

Zarf · 21 Feb 2010 at 16:36

Subliminal Aura said:
Well, look, instead of pulling figures out of the air why not just do the maths ?
1500/8 = what ? Still blame me for being 'snarky' ?

SATA uses 8b/10b encoding so the 1.5Gb/s is actually 1.2Gb/s or 150MB/s. Then theres additional overhead that means in practice you never reach 150, just as the Micron c300 can reach 350MB/s on SATA3, but only gets around 265MB/s on SATA2.

Here are some benchmarks of Intel SSD's on SATA1 and as you can see, Maximum sequential reads are limited to around 130MB/s, as I said.
http://communities.intel.com/thread/9812;jsessionid=5328108A8C844A733357EE1D98AE2D2E.node5COMS

When exactly ?

quite often, If you take a look at some of the benchmarks in Anandtechs latest SSD article and think a little you can clearly see that drives with phenomenally good 4k performance are not as far ahead of their competitors as you'd think, in fact on the heavy workload bench the Toshiba based Kingston Value drive is significantly ahead of the Indilinx drives and even the new Sandforce controller.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3747&p=12

Without a doubt you'll notice a huge increase. Personally I'm not a huge fan of SSDs as I don't like the maintence involved but if you go for the 160gig X25-m keeping 50% free and ensuring that you don't overdo large amounts of writes to it (eg downloading needless stuff/torrents etc) then you'll be overwhelmed

If you kept up to date at all on SSD's, you'd know that things are nowhere near that bad. The x25's support TRIM and Intel has a nice utility for automatically scheduling TRIM's even if your OS doesn't support them. Intel Drives have great wear levelling algorithms, so you don't need to keep anywhere near 50% free, I keep around 10% free on my drive and it's only at 98% lifespan remaining (yes, you can check this in the SMART values) after 1TB of writes over 6 months. At this rate It'll last 25 years!
Torrent etc all you want, as long as you're not running a database on it or benchmarking 24/7 the drive will be obsolete well before you run out of writes.

xy16644 · 21 Feb 2010 at 16:40

Thanks for all the replies!

Does my laptop support SATA II though? It looks like it does according to the screenshot I posted earlier (just click the link). I'm a bit confused about this...