SATA II SSD OCZ, is it easy?

Hi guys,

Is it easy to change the hard-drive of the M15X? I was thinking of getting this:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-000-OC&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=

Looks really fast with SATA II.

 

Yea, you just open the service cover and remove the plate holding the hard drive and swap them.

 

Oh right, but i guess that voids the warranty of the entire system? Or if it breaks, can i just replace the old hard-drive back in?

 

I don't think it would void the warranty, but you'd have to go and actually read the warranty to find out,

 

Lessaj, do you think the SSD will improve my FPS in games? or does it just improve loading times?

 

It won't improve FPS. Loading times might be a little better...

 

Hi greg, thanks for the reply. Hmm I guess I might not get it for a while then if it wont improve anything, just the idea of no moving parts, less heat etc is really attractive seeing the M15X is hot already as it is...

 

Only loading times will benefit yes, but it's very useful in games that are constantly loading (like in WoW when you're flying around and stuff) or if you're working with either large files, or lots of little files. I'd also imagine that defragging the disk is a breeze.

 

it's also worthwhile to note, that despite recent improvements to the situation, flash disks can still only be written to a limited number of times... currently somewhere in the millions of writes, however, this can put your data at risk if you're doing a lot of writes to the hdd.

personally i run my harddrive to the max. constantly throwing something new at it. i don't think i'd ever be able to make an SSD last more than a year... unless i treated in really nicely (yeah right)...

 

but according to calculations on some websites, even then apparnetly SSDs last like over 10 years still?

 

loading times.. no comment, but installing windows.. and defragging, yes!...

my m15x with a 160gb hd 7200rpm takes 6-7 hours to defrag... my m5550 with a 32gb ss takes <1 hr.

also i don't have to clean my m5550 as much and it doesnt get clogged up as fast

 

@Jl - My 160GB 5400RPM drive on my M9750 takes around 50 minutes to defrag so you may want to check that out, lol.

@Kaiser - Dude just wait at least another year or two. It makes no sense to may that much of a premium for such little space. SSD's are like flash drives. Everyone used flash drives but I just used CD's until the prices of flash drives just started to drop. I'd suggest you just wait a year or two and save yourself some money. The performance increase isn't even noticeable to some people.

 

Yeah its actually freakin expensive when I come to think about it and probably by next year, they will have 128G SSDs at half the price probably....

Ill probably hold off and stick with my 120G for now. Cheers

 

Just out of curiosity, why are you defragging an SSD? It gains absolutely no benefit, and is only decreasing the life of the drive. You don't ever need to defrag SSDs.

 

My thought exactly. the "seek time" of standard harddrives is what you're trying to avoid by defragging. when data is in a continuous stream on a standard disk, it will stream much faster than if the drive needs to "seek" to the new data... hense, defragging will drasticly improve performance (depending on the severety of the fragmentation)... however, with SSD's the seek time is comparable to other forms of memory (RAM comes to mind... but it's not even close to the RAM of today's generation, think about 3 or 4 generations behind... still freakin fast)... which is easily 50x faster (if not more) than standard harddrives. nearly eliminating the problem... and considering you basically have to SEEK to every new piece of information, there really IS NO BENEFIT to doing it.

as heavy harmonies said, you're merely decreasing the life of the drive... with all that read/write action.... considering you only get maybe a million writes to each piece of data on the drive.

i'd also recommend against any in-depth error scanning... since most of them will write bits to the drive, then try to read them to see if the bits are okay... again "scrubbing" the disk and eating up writing cycles better spent on other things.

 

umm... seriously, I am sure that an ssd has more life in it than just 1 million writes. Even So, how freaking long must it take to get to 1 million writes?

lets see...

1000/day x 365d/yr = 365,000 writes per year.

1000 writes to a single sector per day seems excessive, and even if you got that much in, it would last 3 years.

It is sooooo worth it for the m15x. look at the front page review, and then ask yourself "will the heat difference affect my m15x at all?"

seriously... minimal heat vs. a 7,200 RPM hdd... really...

 

At 1 million writes, an ssd is expected to last (by manufacturers calculations) somewhere in excess of 100 years. Mtron makes claims of 2 million writes which make it just a bit longer.

The most scrutinized method of determining the life of a slc ssd is 49 years. Mls ssds are a bit different and are expected to last somewhere in the area of 10 years. They will be much cheaper once released though because of the cheaper mlc NAND vice slc NAND.

As for defragging, there are several threads here that discuss it. To give you the coles notes, there is no spinning disk which results in extremely little fragmentation. In the same respect, fragmentation does not slow an ssd as it does a hard drive.

The access time of an ssd is around .2ms max where it averages 15ms for a hd. A hd is actually much slower because, unlike an ssd which picks up everything in .2ms, the hd will take 15ms to pick up a bit, then another finding the spot and picking up the next bit...until the entire file is retrieved.

The "Know Your SSDs" article best suits the information sought here.

Oh and back to where this article started.... switching a ssd is the same as switching a regular hard drive. Back up your system, pull it out, insert the ssd, restore or reinstall the system...simple as that. My Dell Clean Install thread is based on use of an ssd.

 

don't you mean "a hd is actually much slower..."

 

The answer's less clear than you would expect. For reading streams, reasonably unfragmented HDDs are faster. For reading bursts, SSDs are faster. iirc, writes are faster on HDDs.

 

NO... I did make the mistake and subsequently, newer ssds cannot be compared even through reading streams or writes; they are now twice as fast in most cases.

The HD simply does not compare. I would invite anyone to glance through benchmarks in my New SSD Thread which has that of both the HD and ssd. Just for giggles, you can probably check out that of the new SATA II review i did.

 

Hello

Hardware:
Asus Striker II Extreme
XFX 9800 gtx Black Edition
2*1go OCZ Platinum 12800
HDD sata: OCZ 32Go SATAII SSD (of course... but this is ther problem)

I have installed many time vista with this hardware, tested every bios. 704 show better performance during Vista install, but ... once installed, my problem still the same :

I instal asus drivers, vga drivers, chipset driver (67.7.6), nforce 9.64 ... and after 2, or 3 reboot, Vista bugs:
- Right Click > Customize on desktop does'nt work anymore (nothing happens)
- Right Click > Properties on Computer Icon on desktop doesn't work too...
- "Welcome" Vista window doesn't appear.

And sometime, during 1 or 2 reboot, all come back, then bug again at next boot.

I still can start any other software, navigate Internet, browse my HDD, play games .... but sometime corruptions occure ...

What is Strange is that, i have tested with a "normal" sata drive ... and all works fine !

It seems like excpetional accest time of SSD causes problems to chipsets ... I really like to solve that, SSD is as expensive as nice to use. And except that bug, Vista is really boosted by using SSD.

Another strange thing: the bios activate JMicron RAID Controller (and the CDROM install corresponding drivers) when i use the SSD sata, but not when i use "normal" sata.

 

I installed two 32Gb OCZ SSD's a couple weeks ago. Yes, it's very easy.

Forget all the "speculation" about loss of data due to limited write cycles. Who here has ever seenthis happen? I know many people who have been using SSD's in combat environments for years and they've never experienced a failure. I do however know many people who have experienced HDD failures.

Everyone always seems to like comparing data derived from testing software, but I think whats even more valid are the "seat of the pants" real world improvments you get with SSD's. My M9750 feels like a totally different laptop. It's not just reduced load times. Everythingis quicker and it doesn't get bogged down during multi-tasking.

My advise to anyone considering the upgrade to SSD's is to consider what people who actually have them have to say.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
M9750
7950 GTX's SLI
Two OCZ SSD's Raid0
Core 2 Duo 2.0
4 Gig OCZ memory
XP Pro Sp3

 

I've had more than a dozen computers and have upgraded all of them. I've added ram, upgraded processors etc. Adding the two SSD's is the single most noticable difference I've ever made. I think that's saying something especially when you consider the M9750 is a high end unit to begin with.

Rob