Thinking about Upgrading HD to SSD in my E6400...thoughts?

I've been looking at the E6410 for several months and trying to decide whether I should upgrade from my E6400...I've decided to stick with my E6400 for at least another year. But I want to make two performance upgrades to my E6400- upgrade to Windows 7 and replace my hard drive with either a SSD or possibly even one of the new Hybrid HD/SSDs.

I've tolerated Windows Vista Home Basic 32-bit for two years, so the Win7 upgrade is well past due! I ordered the 3-pack of Win7 Home Premium upgrade licenses yesterday from Newegg for $124.99. I plan to upgrade my laptop and the Inspiron 530 desktop that I just gave to my parents recently. The Inspiron is running Vista Home Premium 32-bit at present. I'm upgrading both of them to the 64-bit version of Win7, so I willl actually be performing "clean installs" since there is no upgrade path from 32-bit to 64-bit. ***Note- I can already picture how I'll be spending my entire Xmas day...maybe the EggNog (and by EggNog I mean BEER) will make the process more, um, festive!

My laptop currently has a 320GB 7200rpm Seagate Momentus hard drive that I installed as soon as I took my E6400 out of the box. It came with an 80GB 5400rpm drive (from the Dell Outlet), so I ordered the Seagate for improved performance and to quadruple my storage also. Unfortunately, the Seagate has not lived up to my performance expectations at all. Boot-up takes up 65-70 seconds, which is actually 5-10 seconds SLOWER than with the original 5400rpm drive!!! There is also no noticeable improvement in file access, read/write times or even in how quickly programs launch!? Initially, I was so disappointed that I had Seagate replace it under warranty...but the brand new one they sent me doesn't perform any better.

I would have eventually accepted the situation and learned to tolerate the performance issues...BUT the Seagate drive has an even more annoying flaw. I can CONSTANTLY hear it spinning from the instant I open my laptop until I shut it down...and it drives me NUTS! For the first month or more, I thought it was my laptop's fan running all the time, but when I undervolted the CPU and installed heat monitoring software, I realized how cool my system runs and there's no way a fan could be running all the time! Turns out the whirring/whoosing sound is the stupid Seagate Momentus sprinning right under my left palm rest. I have considered replacing it with a quieter drive from Western Digital, but hated to waste the $90-ish I paid for the dud I have PLUS $70 more for a replacement...so I kept what I had and grew increasingly bitter over the situation instead- not productive, but it's free!

So....I have been somewhat intrigued by the new Hybrid Hard Drives that feature SSD memory to improve certain areas of performance. But they cost at least $110 or more for a 320GB version and guess who makes them....Seagate! I still love my external Seagate FreeAgent Go hard drives and my desktops at work and home have always had Seagate drives and I've never had a problem before now. BUT a regular SSD will still blow away the Hybrid and will make the most noticeable impact on my system's performance!

I've barely used 45GB of on the 320GB drive and over 40GB is the the OS and installed programs. I'm thinking that a 64GB SSD would be more than sufficient to hold my OS and program files. I have the adapter tray to use a 2nd hard drive in the optical drive slot and I will probably use this annoying Seagate drive for data files only and as a 2nd hard drive. It will only be spinning when in use, so I won't hear it very often.

A decent 64GB SSD will be close to $100, but I think the benefits will be well worth the investment. I'm also thinking that if I do get a new laptop in a year or so, I can just pop the SSD out of the old one and into the new one....

Any thoughts or suggestions? Will I regret only going with the 64GB? I wish I could have my new drive in time for the Win7 upgrade, but it's just not in the budget for another two or three months, I'm afraid.

 

No SSD experience here so I'll be listening.

You could install Win7 on the 80GB drive and enjoy the quiet energy-efficient speed. And setup the 320GB drive as a second drive to port your data across and to implement a daily backup scheme. Perhaps save the 80GB clean Win7 image on the 320GB for a later restore when you retire the E6400 (after pulling the SSD and 320GB).

GK

 

Well, I myself have bought an 120GB Intel SSD. But I would watch out with the size... While doing research I've come accross forum discussions about how Windows7, Vista and Windows2008 installations sometimes artificially "blow up" over time. An issue related to the WinSxS subdirectory under systemroot.

See: Disk Space - Windows 7 Forums

Here's the problem: this folder "doesn"t actually consume the diskspace it seems to consume" because it uses hardlinks. Which is great, but I've seen reported (don't have the links here though...) that Windows explorer is ALSO fooled, and the result is that you'll get "not enough diskspace" messages pretty soon if your system partition is on the small side. So I was a bit paranoid to buy a small "boot-only" SSD for that reason and went to higher capacity. My Win7 partition is now about 70GB.

 

JH-man is right and your windows installation will blow up with time, however it is not a very large blow up perhaps 100-500mbs a year in pure logs. Temporary internet files can easily reach a few gigabytes over the course of a year. Clean Disk will take care of them for the most, and TRIM will be your best of friends.

Considering you are using 44 gb, consider that 64 bit applications/operating systems require a bit more space then their 32 bit counterparts. So I would say go for an 80gb SSD to be safe.

Overall I think you will be happy with the SSD purchase, I stuck an 80gb SSD (Intel X25-M G2) on my Latitude E6500.
I ran vista on it for a few days until finally I had to go to 64 bit to make full use of my 4gbs of ram. Im booting in under 30 seconds (23-24 seconds to be exact) from BIOS to loading of all my start up programs which are:
CPU-Genie
MSN Live
Adobe Reader/etc start up
Security essentials
Creative SB Entertainment module (Sound card)
Dell Controlpoint

Some of you guys will say well boot times don't matter. Well they do matter when your in college, and you're scrambling to take notes but can't because your laptop is taking a minute to two minutes to boot.

Also productivity is also better, since your using a SSD most read/writes are done immediately and are not halted by 4k reads/writes so overall you have a nice experience with multi tasking heavy programs.

Etc.

 

In everyday usage an E6400 with SSD will feel faster than an E6410 without SSD. See my E6410 review (link in signature) for some benchmark results.

However, unless you run a lean Windows + software + user files installation, 64GB will be uncomfortably tight.

John

 

The best part about getting an SSD is that you'll be able to move it to a new laptop in the future, so there's no need to skimp on it. 64GB is much too small, I would recommend at least 120GB (I got the 256GB Samsung because I need as much storage as possible, I keep several system images).

Performance-wise, 5K and 7K won't be noticeable, but increased noise from the 7K drive will be. I wouldn't recommend 7K drives for laptops (get an eSATA powered cable for the 320GB, you can use it as an external HDD...that's what I did with the 160GB 7K drive that came with my E6400).

 

The Hitachi 7.5k 7200 RPM 500gb hard drive is very quite. Or at least quieter then the fan on my e6500 (pre ssd upgrade).

 

I've had a couple Hitachi 7K drives in the past, and while they aren't loud, they do make more noise (and heat, they heated up the palmrest pretty well) than 5K drives.

 

I have the 320GB Hybrid Seagate in my 6410. It is completely silent and spunkier than the 320GB 7.2k Seagate that it replaced. I did not do any benchmarks or such so I cannot quantify the speed increase for you, but it is noticeable.

You should not be able to hear any modern drive running in your laptop. My last many have been completely silent. Then, too, I have 55 year old ears and my doc says I have lost some hearing although it does not affect me in my daily routine. You can RMA any drive and they'll send you a recertified replacement which is what I would do if I got ahold of a noisy one.