M17x R2 SSD....

Hey guys.

Got my R2, am freaking loving it. Quick question, I hear lots of stories with slow SSD's etc... in laptops...

What would be my best option?

1. Intel X25m 160gb
2. OCZ Vertex 2 120gb

Cheers

 

SSD's may run differently on a mobile chipset as opposed to desktop to save battery power. The people that spent the most on their SSD's are the ones making the most noise so that should give you hint as to which brands to avoid. All SSD's are fast so pick a budget and pick the largest one you can afford.

 

Of the two you posted, the OCZ is faster. The OCZ also has faster memory on it. You can tell because of the way SSDs work.

The bigger you go with an SSD, the faster it can write data. This is because it can sequentially write to each memory chip (kind of like a raid hard drive array). So, the more memory chips, the faster you can read and write to a SSD.

With that in mind, the 120 OCZ is considerably faster than the Intel. That means the memory is higher bandwidth.

SSD will be faster than an HDD, but if you want the best look at those write and read times and take that into account.

I don't have an SSD currently, but will be getting on in the future. Make sure you look around for the SSD setup threads here. They look very helpful from the parts I've read.

 

Nothing else but the OS and programs go onto my OS Drive. so i dont need such a big drive. But, I guess u do a lot of gaming and need space to install those games thats whay your considering a 120. Is that correct?

I figured I'm gonna buy a 60gb and thats all the space I need. waiting for the price to hit about $120 without rebates. Typically My OS Partition uses up 50GB Max including restore points. My hibernation being activated, which takes up about 3-4gb. right now im using 41Gb. On My OS drive.

 

Yeah, that's what I thought, however, you're saying the people that spent the most made the most noise, so are you saying they were disappointed with the performance? Because it's forced to lose so much performance, would I be better off with a "slower" Kingston drive?

I've got an 80gb Intel in my desktop and that's full, so the 120gb should be awesome for me.

 

You want to have at least 30% to 40% free space on an SSD drive. The performance will drop increasingly quickly as the drive fills up from that point.

This has to do with cell fragmentation in the drive memory chips themselves. TRIM alleviates this so that it balances out a bit, but there is always still a dropoff in performance once you reach that level of drive usage in SSD.

So if you think you habve 55G of OS + apps / pagefile / hibernation / etc, then you should go with a drive that is *at least* 100G... but as NiteSkie mentions, the more free space the better the drive will operate.

SSD has no armature (the "head") so it can read/write to each chip in parallel. The drive controller knows this and so if operations can be spread out across the chips then performance is going to be a lot better. This is directly opposite of an HDD which gets highest performance when that armature doesn't need to move as much.

 

So basically, due to the performance bottlenecks the laptop causes, should I be going for the quickest SSD or an average SSD (Still fast) as the quicker/more expensive will be slowed to the cheaper SSD speeds?