Laptop HDD - Solid State question..

nintenjo · 14 Jan 2009 at 13:28

Hi all,

My laptop currently has a 80GB 2.5" SATA HDD in it.. and i am very tempted to get it upgraded as its not really big enough.

However i have noticed that Solid State drives are becoming very cheap these days and i am tempted to wait a few months and then get:

64GB OCZ Technology 2.5", SATA 300, 143MB/s Read and 93MB/s Write speed SSD

Or similar.. in 128GB size. The price is quite reasonable at about £150. And they id get an external drive for all my large file storage.

question is how will solid state affect:

Performance (loading times etc)
Power consumption?
Weight?
Noise.. i assume there is none.

Id be running Windows 7 (or similar) 64bit edition.

Laptop is a Centrino duo 2.2Ghz, 4GB PC6400 DDr2 RAM, Nvidia 8800M 512mb.

Zarf · 14 Jan 2009 at 14:14

Wait for the next generation to come out, the current budget SSD's suffer from Random Write issues unless used on a dedicated RAID controller ... which your laptop won't have.
The Random Write issue manifests as stuttering, thus ruining the experience.

The OCZ Vertex SSD's with onboard cache are apparently free from this issue, as are the Intel drives.

There will shortly be a whole load of new drives coming in from various manufacturer's, I'd wait for reviews to be certain, but they should be working properly. They'll be about 20% faster too, which is a nice bonus.

nintenjo · 14 Jan 2009 at 20:40

Cool .. well i'll do that then. Might tie in nicely with windows 7 as well.. although i can see that being delayed for ever.

malcolm · 14 Jan 2009 at 23:14

I have an OCZ V2 30Gbyte drive in a netbook. It's one of the 'problem' drives. Since it is a netbook it's not used for critical apps and I have spent quiite some time optimising the set-up to suit the drive.
In normal use it is blindingly fast. I can open a word document in an instant. Click on a powerpoint file and the application is there. No waiting. I'm very impressed.
No doubt in the future all drives will be 'built this way', but at the moment, for a modest outlay, I can say I'm impressed.
I've put the original 80Gbyte sata drive from the netbook in a USB caddy to use as a portable archive.

Bane · 4 Mar 2009 at 18:43

Considering an SSD for my parents laptop. Its an old Gateway MX6921b fitted with a SATA 1.5Gb/s Hitachi 60GB 5K100. Think it uses ICH7 controller.

Would something like a Samsung 64GB 2.5" SATA 300 MLC be crippled by the system that it negates the benefit of buying one?

EDIT: Did a HD Tach of existing drive using the 8MB option. Pretty poor.