Looking for a SSD for my m11x

Hello , I was wondering what SATA is on the stock m11x r2 320 gb hard drive. If someone could link me to a 128 gb SSD on newegg i would be happy

 

R2 is SATA 2 / SATA 300. Take your pick for the most part, just don't get a Kingston V-Series (V+ and V+100 are ok) because it consumes more power than a hard drive.

 

how is the kingston V series SNV425? does it really use more power then a HDD? if so am i better off buying another SSD(even thought i'm currently using it in my system)? i'm not changing it for extra speed but i'd like more battery life as the i7 R3 is pathetic.

 

What power issues are you having? I got a good 7 hours with the stock HDD.

 

i get around 5-6 hours idle and around 3 hours of real usage. power draw is around 11-15W idle and 20+ normal usage excluding games and that is with minimal screen lighting, wifi and BT on and alienFX

 

Wow, that seems like a lot of power. Screen from minimum to max will vary by less than 2W. AlienFx lighting consumes about 5W. I can get my power usage to 7-8W with lighting off, wifi on, and well over 7 hours real use. I did an idle test and got near 10 hours.

 

Sounds like you are not setting your power plan to "Power Saver"
To get 7 hours you need that and lower your max CPU state and no overclock.

 

I don't even run at power saver. I use balanced. Screen brightness at 30-40%, AlienFX off which is your biggest power drain, wifi at medium power saving (although haven't noticed much difference), CPU state is 100% always, and now at 2.0GHz, nary a difference in battery life. Easily exceeds 7 hours. If I need the keyboard lighting, I just turn on AlienFX temporarily and then back off.

 

Hi HTWingNut,

Just curious if you did leave on the keyboard AlienFX lights how much battery life are be talking about eating up? An extra 1hr so down to 6hrs usage?

Cheers.

 

My m11x r2 loves it's OCZ Vertex 2 120gb

 

I was thinking about getting the OZ Vertex Agility 3.
Anyone have this SSD drive? experience?

Cheers.

 

None of the m11x have SATA 3.0, so you won't really see any benefit to the Agility 3 versus Agility 2, but it is backwards compatible with SATA 2.0 and will work fine.

The only reason to get an Agility 3 would be if you are anticipating using it in a future notebook or desktop that has SATA 3.0. IE. Something with an Intel Sandy Bridge chipset.

 

Thanks mephiska,

Yep I am anticipating that I will be using the SSD for future notebooks down the track. I also am looking at the Oz Vertex Agility 3 because it is the only drive they sell here locally which is priced reasonably and has pretty awesome performance. So it stood out to me.

I do wonder though what read/write speeds the M11x can utilise from one of the Agility 3 series SSDs. 300 odd meg read/write would still be pretty awesome. I guess in theory it should max or top out at the SATA II threshold for bandwidth or somewhere close to it.

I wonder how much battery life will be boosted by adding a SSD to the M11x as well. Perhaps 15 mins or 30 mins.

Every little bit counts I guess and it will give it that much more portability + then I can dance around and not have to worry about it BSODing on me due to hard drive errors LOL!

Cheers.

 

hmm the lack of sata 3 worries me, not sure if these sandy bridges are of the failbridge with shoddy sata controller. afaik it wouldnt affect sata3 ports but only sata2

 

Depends on the SSD. For me Intel has proven to offer the best battery life over other SSD's. It has added well over an hour in my M11x from the stock hard drive (from ~ 6 or so hours to well over 7), and ~ 30 mins on my ULV netbook.

No, Dell released R3 after the whole Intel SATA ordeal. In any case ports 0 and 1 are unaffected.

 

WOW

I really didn't know that an SSD could make so much difference to the battery life. That really is amazing and good news. Thanks for the info!

Cheers.

 

Just quickly looking online and i think i might go for an OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SATA II 2.5-inch Internal Solid State Drive. It doesnt have Agility in the name does that make it as good?

Also i currently have 2 x 4GB @ 800MHz RAM but id like to upgrade maybe initially to 6GB so id have to get a new 4GB stick, will it work in Dual Chanel with 2GB & 4GB? Appreciate the help.

 

Wait, I'm a bit confused - can the M11x R3 use SATA III SSDs? What is this about the Sandy Bridge SATA ordeal?

 

Depends on SSD though, they can vary greatly. It all depends on your usage too. Some idle at low power, but consume a lot when doing certain operations, while others idle requiring more power but don't consume nearly as much when doing certain operations.

For the "normal" user that just wants the day to day benefit of an SSD for their OS and fast loading times, and won't be doing lots of file copies, extracting, encoding video, etc, idle power is the best thing to look at, along with 4k read/write consumption (primarily read). So in other words, determine what's most important to you: battery life, fast sequential read/writes, fast 4k read/writes, etc and do a little research to find the drive that works for you.

 

This is incorrect.

The R3 has SATA 3.0

 

In any case the CPU may bottleneck the SATA 3 speeds, not to mention those speeds are usually for sequential read/write of large files, which people typically do very rarely. Don't choose an SSD based on whether it's SATA 2 or SATA 3 unless sequential read/write speeds are most important to you. For most people they aren't. The most important benchmark for SSD's with general Windows use is the 4k read/write which won't even saturate a SATA 1 bus.

 

Ah! That's why you get such good battery life. So if I throw a SSD on my R3 I bet it'd go from 6.30 hrs to well over 7 too. ;-)

 

Just an FYI

I also recently switched from the stock 7200 RPM 750gb HDD in my R3, to a 256gb Crucial M4.

I'm EASILY getting 7 hours of web surfing, torrenting, etc.

Unbelievably better battery life - really loving the speeds too. This SSD is definitely more efficient than my previous Phoenix Pro (great drive though!)

 

Another m11x R2 now running on SSD.

I got a Cruical C300 256GB for "only" 350€ and did some testing whether it is as good as all talk about.
The only word I can describe this thing is "awesome". Never thought the difference would be that notable. Now the m11x is just what i wanted a notebook to be. small, noiseless (fan kicks in only one or two times an hour whit normal workload), approx 7h battery and fast.

Yust a quick comparision: Outlook start time with HDD: 56 sec and with SSD: 7 sec. (outlook 2010 with 3 accounts and some addins)

Some benchmark is in the attachment for the bench gurus. Hope that helps deciding for a SSD ;D