What is the fastest SSD?

Retro6

Retro6

Retro6

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30 Jan 2019
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I'm working on another Laptop, which is fairly old, its a Panasonic ToughBook CF-30 with excellent battery life, 4GB RAM Dual core 2 duo processor @ 1.6GHz 160GB 5400RPM HDD.

So I understand that these specs are very low by today's standards however this ToughBook will be used as a diagnostic machine so it doesn't have to be particularly fast, its not going to be used for gaming or anything like that, that being said, I would still like to max this old ToughBook out with hardware upgrades to make it the fastest it can be.

I'll be starting with the 5400 RPM HDD. I will be replacing it with an SSD (the fastest SSD possible)

Now I have quite a few spare SSD's laying around, most being 120GB or 240GB which is enough storage for this sort of laptop. It will be getting Windows 10 installed.

From my online searches the Samsung EVO 850 120GB suggests that its the fastest SSD I have according to online benchmark tests.

Here is a list of the SSD's I have:

Samsung EVO 850 120GB
Samsung EVO 840 120GB
WD Green 120 GB
WD Blue 240GB
Kingston Hyper X 120GB
Intel DC S3500 Series 120GB

Online searches tell me the Intel SSD's wouldn't be all that quick. The Kingston Hyper X looks to be a decent SSD but the one I have is from 2012 however it might still be fast by todays standards I don't know... the WD blue SSD's scored high benchmark tests from a youtube video I watched.

I understand that faster SSD performance could be bottle necked by the slow CPU.

What SSD would you recommend from the list?
 
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I have installed the Samsung EVO 850 SSD and Windows 10 and its made a world of difference. Its very snappy, Next I'll be looking at the RAM although the Maximum RAM for this machine is said to be 4GB it is possible to add up to 8GB RAM to the Panasonic CF-30 from my online research. DDR2 RAM in 4GB modules is a bit rarer and generally more expensive than the standard 2GB DDR2 RAM modules but maybe I might come across some for cheap if I keep looking otherwise 4GB RAM is fine. I think there may also be a RAM speed limit with the ToughBooks I know some can be fussy when it comes to RAM.
 
Update...

Windows 10 installed fine and fly's on this ToughBook I managed to activate it with the old Panasonics Windows 7 product key I didn't think it would work but I thought I would give it a try and it activated :) I've also adjusted Windows 10 for best performance to make it even faster. Good result all around.
 
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Good HDDs are circa 120MB/s. Even the cheapest nastiest SSD is going to get you 4 times that speed. While the fastest SATA SSD is only likely to get your 5 times as fast.

If you had space for 2 SSDs, then you could put both into a striped RAID0 config and get double speed again.

The big speed is in the NVMe drives. Even the cheap ones are capable of 6 to 10 times faster than an SATA SSD.
 
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