Replace HDD with SSD, a good idea?

Hi~

I ordered my m11x on 20/08.
My estimated arrival date is 7/09. It takes more than 15 days

I am thinking about replacing HDD with SSD (intel G2) by myself but 80GB one seems too small considered how large games are nowadays.

Do you guys think it's worth to spend on SSD?
What will be improved by changing HDD to SSD?

Read lots of threads in this forum and they are very useful. Gonna try optimizing and tweaking my m11x when it arrives

Thank you for the info.

 

Those who have them say YES
Those who don't are still happy with HDD performance
Then there are some who went for the Momentus XT hybrid

If you have the money and don't need HUGE GBytes of storage and can find one you like... yes it will make a substantial difference.

Queue the A-Team theme...

 

classic answer.the only factor is your money,if you have enough.
why not ssd?

 

I would have to say yes, go for it. You will notice an increase in performance.
I have heard good things about the momentus XT too.

 

i heard the momentus sucks up a lot of power.

anyway, imo go SSD or go HDD.. don't mix it up like u do with the momentus, thats just plain silly.

it complicates ur life lol

I sense flames coming................. *puts on a fire blanket

 

This is the best article I have read on the subject: Are Solid-State Drives Worth the Money?

Here is the cliffnotes version (though it's worth reading the whole thing). For some people, they can be worth it, but they are not worth it for all people. It depends how you use your computer.

 

I think that article boils it down pretty well. For me personally, I don't know that applications starting - let's say 50% or even 75% faster for the sake of illustration - is /that/ important to me when you weigh in the costs involved with decent sized SSD drive. For me the Momentus XT made a lot more sense. Most of the application startup speed benefit, a fraction of the cost and the capacity I wanted.

 

Not in my experience it doesn't.

 

if you have the funds and can afford at minimum at 128gb SSD then go for it anything smaller and you will not enjoy having a decent collection of games, music and movies on the go.

If you can sacrifice alittle bit the momentux xt is a great solution until SSD drives come down in price and double in size which should happen in the next 6-9 months with intel roadmap leaked. You might be able to easily afford the gen 2 160gb with stores clearing them out or step up to the gen 3 for a nice price when they are introduced.

 

haha I agree with you there, I would just pick one or the other. I havent tried out the momentus but generally good responses but i wasnt willing to try it out anyway

+1 for making me laugh

 

@corwinicre
Nice article! Thanks

Guess I will use it first to see whether I need the upgrade or not. Shouldn't be hurried to decide. If eventually I choose to upgrade, a 160 GB one would be my pick.

 

Whether it is worth getting an SSD depends on how badly you want performance, and how much you are willing to pay for it.

Going from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD is like going from 56K dial-up modem to a high speed broadband connection. An SSD will improve load times on everything that ever needs to load data - OS boot times, application load times, game load times. On general application use, there is a very subtle effect where everything just feelslike it instantly loads and "snaps" whenever you launch an application.

Is it worth it? If you have the money, then yes it is worth it. Just like it was worth getting broadband when aDSL and cable modems first came out, if you could afford the price premium over 56K dial-up.

 

I honestly didn't notice too big of a difference between my Intel 160g G2 SSD and my Seagate 320g 7200rpm

I mean booting of course it went faster but in general just doing applications I didn't notice. If I had a choice I would have waited for SSDs to get cheaper. I had the SSD in my M11x then took it out to put the original 320gig back in and haven't noticed a difference aside from booting.

 

My experience is similar to Danyune. Two actions were dramatically faster for me - booting up and apply patches to games. Otherwise, I only launch the same handful of apps, so Windows superfetch will keep them in RAM, nullifying any advantage the SSD woudl have. I only reboot when Windows needs to for patching - otherwise I only go to sleep mode.

I had my SSD for a couple weeks and I ended up selling it on eBay. Just wasn't worth the combination of cost and compromise (of space) for me.

 

What danyune and Thermogenic are describing in terms of their real-world, every day user experience is exactly what the XT has done for my system. Things are snappy and open quickly, but for gaming, browsing, email, Photoshop, Lightroom, etc., etc. it's doesn't really matter.

 

Yah I mean all I do is watch videos, browse web, e-mail, word process, and play WoW

SSD definitely isn't worth the investment for that. I should have sold my G2 before they announced the G3 leak from Intel

Depends on what you're going to be doing I guess. Chances are your M11x will be limited by the GPU/CPU for games rather than hard drive load.

 

An SSD is definitely a luxury item, and not a necessity. It's really the last component to upgrade, after you look at your system and decide that your CPU, GPU, and RAM are all "good enough".

Once you hit that "good enough" point, money that you spend towards CPU, GPU, and RAM will quickly show diminishing returns. Whereas upgrading a mechanical hard drive to an SSD will have a much better bang-for-your-buck. When you hit that point, it makes sense to consider an SSD.

 

Isn't what Seagate calls "Adaptive Memory technology" that pre-loads applications on the flash memory exactly what Windows' Superfetch does with RAM?

If so, how is the XT an advantage? I know it is an advantage over a standard 7200rpm (or so many users' reports and articles indicate), but I haven't been able to figure out why exactly. The reports about it are generally positive, so I've been considering switching, but I'd like to know exactly what the advantages and disadvantages are to make sure it's worth the 2-3 times larger price of the same size 7200rpm hd.

For someone who knows more about it, I have a couple questions.

--Is it better at figuring out which applications to preload?
--Or does it adapt faster? So then Windows' Superfetch will equal it after some amount of time for people who use the same programs most often (?)
--Or is it that the additional 4gb on top of the available ram for 'Superfetching' means more applications can be preloaded? Then it isn't as helpful for people who use few programs. Also, having 8gb of ram for Superfetch is better than 4gb of ram and an XT (only) because ram is faster than flash memory. Of course, it is a bit cheaper to get a 500gb XT and 4gb of ram ($130+$100=$230) than a 500gb 7200rpm and 8gb of ram ($50 + $200=$250).
--Or is it a combination of these things?


Sorry for the semi-threadjack Gainsayer, but perhaps you might want this info also.

 

having an SSD in your machine as apposed to a regular hard drive... the difference is as noticable as night and day. the people that are saying you wont notice the difference simply have no real world experience with them...

THAT is fact...

 

Who said you won't notice a difference with an SSD?

 

Think of it as a really large hard drive cache. The controller on traditional mechanical hard drives determine either the most frequently accessed data or the most recently accessed data, and puts it in the cache. The only difference with the Momentus XT is that the cache isn't just some measly 32MB cache - it is 4GB SLC NAND memory.

You can think of Superfetch and the Seagate Momentus XT as two separate layers of cache. Yes, Superfetch is faster (because RAM is faster than storage - even SLC NAND storage). But it basically acts as another layer of cache, that has several distinct advantages. First, it can potentially speed up data access for items that aren't in SuperFetch, when the OS needs to go to disk. Having another layer of cache is always good. Second, it can cache things that Superfetch cannot, such as the OS files accessed during system boot.

In theory, suggesting that Superfetch will supercede any benefit from the Seagate Momentus XT has some possibility of being valid. But when you look at actual real-world performance, and measured benchmarks, they repeatedly show that the Seagate Momentus XT performs better than standard 2.5" 7200rpm hard drives.

 

just about every post on this thread claims you wont notice much of a difference... and that is just simply wrong...

coming from someone who owns SSD's i have to say that it is about the best investment you can make in your machine as far as making it faster... EVERY mouse click you make will produce a near INSTANT result.

platter based HD's (4 gig cache or not!) won't produce the results that you will get from an SSD...

PERIOD...

 

Thank you very much (it won't let me +rep you, but I will when I can).

 

^ This ^

I recently lost one of my SSD's (main PC) and am running off a WD Black, I honestly forgot HOW MUCH of a difference the SSD's make. It's like I'm going back to what my computer felt like 5 years ago (this is a i7 930 overclocked to 4.2, 12 g ram 2x5850 sapphire vapors, a pretty quick machine, or so I thought till I lost my SSD). Fine it won't give you better FPS but any and all load times are so much faster, it's hard to believe. People talk about boot times and Yes that's where you will see the biggest improvement simply because it's the longest load time you will see of anything you execute, but ALL programs load so much faster, click and it's open. I personally couldn't run without an SSD anymore. It's costly, no doubt about it, but there is nothing you can upgrade on your computer that will give the instant boost an SSD will.

 

The nand inside a momentus xt can't really be described synonymously with a cache... The cache that you see referred to on most hard drive pages is actually the disk buffer. The data in the disk buffer isn't reused and serves merely as a holding place for data being written or read off the drive, allowing the drive a constant immediate pool of data to write. The drive will also signal the operating system that the write is complete once the data is in the cache to help speed up the experience for the user. The buffer allows another write to be sent to the drive before the current one is finished.
The momentus xt essentially takes all of the data that is most frequently accessed and allocated it to the nand. When a request comes along to access that data, rather than spinning up and doing a normal read, it reads it off the nand.
Think of it as a normal hard drive (a highend one with that 32 mb cache!) that takes 4 gb of your most used data and makes it available sooner (lower latency) and faster (higher throughput). The result is that things you do (like booting windows) happen at near-ssd speeds while you still have the advantage of having standard hdd space and price.
I am, of course, biased toward these babies.
I find myself rebooting much more often since I know it boots up in a flash.
I also enjoy the 500 gb size, I'd hate to lay down the ton of money a 256 gb ssd costs and then realize I am filling it up with things that I don't need that read speed for; I am not afraid to save hd movies on my drive

edit:
I must admit, you will see standard write rates of a platter hd on the momentus. So in that arena, ssds still take the cake. With an 11" screen and only a 100 mb ethernet port though you would be hard pressed to find many areas you will be wishing you had a significantly faster write speed.


edit2:
in the tomshardware review they see the boot up time for their installation go from "1:52 on the first run and an amazing 0:38 after the fourth run"

 

First, if you don't have 8GB of RAM, upgrade your memory. That will help the performance.

If you get an SSD get a 256GB. You will regret it if you don't. I have the Corsair Performance Series. It works fine, far better than the fastest HD by a long shot! I have had both 7200 HD and SSD in my system and I would never go back to HD.
I had a a Crucial 128GB in at first since the 11x is only my travel computer but quickly realized I need more storage. It worked fine, just too small a drive.

 

8 gigs of ram will do NOTHING for your speed... 4 gigs will run any windows install just fine for general surfing, gaming and the like...

ram doesnt add speed... ram allows you to use more programs at the same time...

if you run multiple virtual machines that you assign a buttloads of ram to then you will find use for 8 gigs..

there are other reasons to go for 8 gigs of ram... SPEED isnt one of them...

 

No, I think most posts are saying it depends on usage scenarios. If you mostly just have use a web browser and a media player and have 4GB of RAM, well, you won't notice much difference in day to day tasks - those applications will load one time into RAM and never leave.

From my experience, game loading times, while better, are still slow. These tend to be large sequential reads, which mechanical drives are pretty good at.

If you are short on RAM (thus nullifying Superfetch), reboot a lot, or do a lot of heavy disk actions (e.g. loading photoshop), then absolutely an SSD is a great thing to have. If you are a lightweight web surfer who only puts his machine into standby mode, then an SSD is abolutely a waste. If you are in between, it really depends.

 

I'm not going against benchmarks etc I was just saying in my post that to me there's little difference since I don't use many programs at once. AIM MSN Firefox MS Word and a few games. Firefox loads in 0.5s instead of 1s (just guessing) with a SSD. Sure it saved time but its big enough of an impact to justify me spending what I spent on the 160gig G2 SSD from Intel.

I should have sold my SSD while it was still priced high and before Intel G3 drive plans got leaked

 

I almost never shut down my current laptop So, probably fast boost time is not my main concern. But SSD seems to have major improvement in read/write speed and applications start up. I will try to see whether I can tolerate the speed of these operations from my HDD or not

Btw, SSD is also lighter and less power hungry than HDD, right? So, Change to SSD means my laptop will be lighter with longer battery life? Is the different significant?

Good news is I just received an email notify that the production of my unit was done! So, the EDD was changed from 7/09 to 1/09.

To my surprise, it only took 3 days to finish... started production 20/08, finished 23/08

 

the 256gig ssd that dell puts into the m11x feels like a feather weight cheap plastic box... all thats inside it is a circuit board with a coupla chips on it... and it uses less power then old fashioned hdd's but i doubt the difference is noticeable...

 

A bunch of chips on a circuit board, in a plastic box *IS* an SSD. Were you expecting somethign else?

 

I'm sorry... Did I ever, at anytime, say I expected it to be something else??

I was making a point as to why it is so lite....

Calm down big guy!

 

SSD is lighter and uses less power, but neither one is noticeable on this notebook. The SSD is also cooler - not sure if this is noticeable or not. From my experience, it was not, but I didn't exactly pay attention to that.

 

ssd's are the golden standard for laptops nowadays. I wouldnt think twice about geting one in any laptop. As many people as I talk to about how much they love there desktops and how much better they are then laptops, technology keeps bringing us laptop fans more inovation. SSD's are a prime example of this, why should any of us laptop owners have to worry about breaking a harddrive from a droped laptop and losing are data or having to worry about crashing a operating system cause of a bump to it. SSD's were made for walking in laptops and thats just what there going to do so say as the song goes. Even if you have to get a value ssd like intels bottom line, I would get one especialy if its for a laptop.