G73-JH and Failing HDD, Buying SSD

My G73, Has busted 3 HDD's in less that 3 months. One of those times my son smacked the computer on the palm rest while I was working. And it made the HDD fail.

So i decided to buy an SDD, to stop this nonsense.

Will this one work on my G73-JH?
Amazon.com: Crucial 128 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT128M4SSD2: Electronics

 

That will work fine but as I am sure you know you do not have SATA III connection so do not expect max performance. Generally any 2.5 " Notebook drive will work. Hard to go wrong with Crucial, Samsung or Intel. $99 for that drive is a good price also.

 

I have an Asus G73JW and have had problems with all of the following SSDs in it:

• Something by Mushkin (forget the model name, became unreadable by G73JW but still works now it's in my netbook)
• OCZ Vertex 2 (became unreadable to G73JW after about a year, but after running it in another machine seemed to recover and now works intermittently in G73JW and always in other machines)
• OCZ Vertex 4 (two of them, both failed totally and became unreadable in the G73JW and all other machines)

I don't know whether my experience is typical of this model of laptop with SSDs, but it does seem to have some issues with them. I have reverted to dual HDDs after these bad experiences. (I don't yet know whether the HDDs will fare any better in this machine.) All of the SSDs worked at first, but the Vertex 4s failed after about 6 weeks each, and the Mushkin one after a month, whereas the Vertex 2 lasted for about a year.

So I'd recommend you avoid these ones since either they're not reliable or there's a compatibility problem with this laptop. Crucial has a better reputation for reliability than OCZ or Mushkin. I'd be interested to know whether the Crucial one works out for you, since I would like to find an SSD that works well in this laptop.

The general recommendation seems to be Samsung, Crucial or Intel, as JOSEA says. (I didn't know this when I splurged on lesser brands!)

I do find it interesting that your G73 kills HDDs while mine kills SSDs. Perhaps some G73s do something bad to drives?

 

Crucial M4 128GB, it went on for almost a year in my JH until i replaced it (needed more capacity). It's still alive and kicking in another notebook, the 160GB Intel 320 i got as a replacement is still functioning perfectly fine up to now.

The only SSD that failed me was a Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240GB.

 

I can vouch for an SSD being punch proof. People seem to think I have an anger problem (which I very much do) but when I was younger certain games unleash the animal within and I used to bust HDD monthly and then wimper afterwards. With an SSD punch to your hearts content within reason and 99% of the time you will be fine. Unless the SATA Port snaps that is.

In regards to the performance boost it is just as good on SATA II as SATA III it is all about the small reads not the sequential and any SSD is going to destroy a HDD with ease.

I have used only Kingston from an SSD-Now to a V-Pro to a SATA III Hyperx. Never had a problem and never had a failure yet. But the M4 do have the most popularity especially for price and performance.