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Anyone upgrade to SSD HD on their laptop?

2K views 42 replies 17 participants last post by  taledarkside 
#1 ·
Thinking of upgrading my conventional hard drive to SSD to improve performance.

Anyone else try this and was there a noticeable difference?
 
#7 ·
I put one in my G73 laptop along with a second mechanical drive for data and definitely noticed an improvement in OS and program loading speeds. I can easily just close photoshop or autocad and re-open it when I want without any delay. They are not a must have item but if you have two drive bays it's a nice improvement.
 
#8 ·
Just keep in mind that SSD's are still not nearly as reliable in the long-term as traditional hard drives. Like it or not, they all have a higher failure rate. So if you choose to go with an SSD, keep important data backed up elsewhere!
 
#15 ·
I will 2nd Bek's statement, they are just not the same reliability as conventional HDD.

Were transitioning to SSD in our work laptops for development testing. Wave jumping in a boat tends to beat the hell out of a spinning disk. They're faster, take abuse more in stride, but our laptops are all backed up on the central server.
 
#16 ·
I've switched all developers on my team to SSDs over over a year ago (or was it two already? can't remember...). It makes a huge difference, especially for IO intensive tasks and especially on laptops. Replacing HDD with SSD is the single biggest performance improvement you can make with a PC.

Very important thing to note: some older SSDs / previous versions of Windows XP (or any other version pre-Vista) is a time bomb combination. The OS will write the swap file data to the same location and it would quickly degrade the SSD. We had 2 or 3 drives killed that way.

Other than the issue mentioned above, we did not have reliability issues at all. Having that said, keep in mind that when SSDs fail, they typically fail suddenly and completely. With HDDs you normally get some warnings and a short period of time where you can offload the data. With SSD you get an instant brick and if there is no backup, you are fucked.

We are running Crucial 128Gb drives, they cost abound $230 with shipping. If you don't store a bunch of multimedia files / pics, it's more than enough for work/software development.
 
#17 ·
The only failures I'm aware of is the read/write problem. Newer drives with new software are better, but it still exists.

That's why I always laugh at companies releasing tablets and phones with SD card slots for upgraded storage. To get the same speed and read / write cycles as internal memory you have to drop a huge chunk of change on the Card. The average consumer goes out and buys the cheapest knock-off SD card out there, then runs software off of it.


Work is running Crucial 250GB drives, but were looking for an "IT supported" 500GB SSD for the NVH and testing laptops. Our IT department is just idiots........they exist, but they don't want to install them. We generate Gigs of data per 60second dynamics sweep. ;)
 
#21 ·
There are many in the database world who fall under what we call the "accidental DBA." Folks who are nominated to become (usually a small shop's) DBA, because of circumstance or they have some sort of vaguely similar skillset or whatever.

As such, they learn about having a backup plan and what not, but never think further about what to do when disaster actually strikes. The point of the quote is to think beyond "yes, we have backups of all of our shit, we're golden."
 
#22 ·
I'm not clear as to why you wouldn't use one of these drives for files. Can someone explain? Is reliability the reason or are there other reasons?
 
#23 ·
I'm not clear as to why you wouldn't use one of these drives for files. Can someone explain?
Three cases, essentially:

a) You have a lot of data and SSDs are expensive (cost per GB)

b) Your read/write ratio is very heavily skewed toward writes + you have lots of data.

c) Your write rate is totally bonkers and only a huge SAN can handle it.

Most consumer grade SSDs have comparatively low number of overwrite cycles (flash memory degrades with overwrites). It's still pretty high for regular home use, though.

In real life, in over 90% of cases your limitation is cost per GB. Cases b and c are only a problem for enterprise/scientific scenarios.
 
#28 ·
They key word here is "company". I got a new thinkpad X220 with latest mobile Core i7, 8GB of RAM and 160GB SSD yesterday morning and it was relatively slow to start up. Well, big surprise, Lenovo installed everything on it, including a kitchen sink and filled it up with ice cream to boot. It had over 100 processes running on it right after boot.

Plus, business laptops frequently come encrypted and with AV in on access scan mode which is going to slow down anything.
 
#33 ·
I was waiting until someone say so :lmao:.

The thing is, it doesn't just work. I've honestly tried to live with Mac for 2+ weeks. I use iPad 2 a lot, I've had iPhone in the past and I don't have a hatred for Apple. In fact, I love their hardware.

But, Mac OS X is not perfect either. It just works for your casual Internet browsing and photos. It's a great eye candy, visual joy to use. What I don't get is why people say it just works. Sometimes it's ridiculously slow, some things you do in UI don't provide ANY visual feedback, parts of the UI are inconsistent and inconvenient. Mail crashed on me several times in a week of heavy use. Finder is just as bad if not worse than Windows Explorer for file operations (copied large folders over network and it wasn't stellar - slow and showed file counts incorrectly).
 
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