Need info on SSD's...

#1) Do they actually save any battery?? Will the batt last longer? If so how much longer everything else being equal...

#2) My system is working flawless right now. Is there any way to just copy over everything from my current HDD to the SSD? Will it work that way??

#3) I thought I caught some info about degradation over time on them?? Somehting about how they block out that bad area or something like that. Does it just waste away?? How much do you lose and how long?

#4) Does my G51 from BB have an extra space to put one in or do I have to remove the existing HDD? Or buy special bracket for it?

#5) If I get one and can put it in, should I pull the old HDD out?? Cause if I left it in wouldn't that just up my current draw on the battery even if it's not used by having two devices instead of one thus defeating the purpose to get better performance And better battery life?

#5) If they will work in the BB G51 which one is the best selling/best performing for the money/size etc...?

#6) Does it matter if I am running Win Vista 64?

Monk

 

Those are some good questions, I to would like to know the answers

 

1) Yes, haven't tested but there should be reviews out there. It won't be a huge difference.

2) Not recommended. I think there are ways, but very complex in trying to maintain alignment and other considerations.

3) It degrades over time - significantly for write speeds, and less so for read. Random reads are still high - which is what you feel when a system is "snappy". TRIM (Intel and Indilinx drives) help to maintain system performance and peak levels for longer. All SSDs will die at some point as well, though probably will have the same rough life-span as a spinning HD. All SSDs degrade in performance if you fill them up to capacity. I'd recommend you keep them between 50-75% full at max.


4) Yes, Yes, Maybe. The SSD should be in port 0, where your current HD resides. So it needs to be swapped. Otherwise, it will fit in there without a cage if you are resourceful enough with some foam.

5) Obviously, 2 HDs draw more power than 1. It depends on your usage of both HDs.

5) Yes

6) Vista is not optimized for SSDs but you won't have any issues.

 

an ssd is the most important upgrade you can make on a laptop.

your battery life will increase, your windows boot up time will only be 15-25 seconds and things will feel snappier in general.

 

one of themost important anyways...

and, i have seen them boot quicker

 

http://blog.laptopmag.com/web-surfing-test-shows-ssds-better-for-battery-life

Obviously, results will vary based on what exactly the computer's doing, but you do get a bit more battery life with an SSD. Depending on your needs, those extra few minutes could be crucial.

You could, but I don't know of a way to do it painlessly. Several years ago (when I was much more naive), I tried this on XP and wound up with a whole slew of problems. Of course, I could've been doing something completely idiotic without realizing it.

Flash memory does degrade over time and the performance will drop. The drives also do fail eventually. I don't know if this has an impact on battery life or not though. Avoid filling up a SSD to the brim with files that will be permanent fixtures as well, because continuous writes to the same 1 GB area will cause a quicker degradation for that one heavily-used area.

It has an extra space to put another HDD. However, it doesn't come with the required bracket and the ASUS store is usually out of stock. You can substitute something else to hold a drive in place fairly easily. That can do the job of the bracket easily as long as you don't put something in poorly.

The bracket: http://estore.asus.com/shop/item.asp?itemid=4410

You can take the old one out. Using both would increase the power draw and lower battery life, though I wouldn't think having two would decrease performance.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150636+1421541071+1421330854&QksAutoSuggestion=&ShowDeactivatedMark=False&Configurator=&Subcategory=636&description=&Ntk=&CFG=&SpeTabStoreType=&srchInDesc=

They work in the G51.

Nope.

 

There are tools you can use to copy your HD to another.

Check out Acronis - http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/

 

"Ghosting" (i.e. Acronis) from a stock Windows 7 install should be fine from HDD to SSD, or if you've already set the appropriate "offset" in XP or Vista. Windows 7 off the "reserved" 100MB partition has a 1MB offset by default (1,048,576 bytes = 2,048 sectors = 256 Pages) so you should be fine. This matches the "Requirements" for alignment offset for SSD's.

Biggest issue is making sure you're able to run the new SSD drive in AHCI mode instead of IDE mode. If your existing install has your main boot drive in IDE mode, uou can "Ghost"/Clone the drive in IDE mode off the SATA ports. Boot into Windows while still in IDE mode and do the following:

Error message when you start a Windows 7 or Windows Vista-based computer after you change the SATA mode of the boot drive: "STOP 0x0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE"

And now you're on your SSD in AHCI (with NCQ enabled and all that neat stuff) and if you're using Windows 7 with an Intel X-25M G2, you have automagic TRIM if you have updated the firmware on your G2 which avoids all those nasty performance issues and trying to keep your drive from filling up, etc.

Cheers,
Kermee

 

Was gone all day in the sim. Couldn't wait to get back to the thread. Thanks everyone for the Really good info! While the really quick boot times are nice my current setup boots to usable in 48-52 secs. And of course the 8 secs into express gate. It's tempting...but sounds like I'll stick to factory for now. Maybe when I decide in a year to up the cpu. Again...thanks to all for the help in answering all my questions.

Monk

 

The beauty of SSD's is loading time in general. Split second loading screens in games, no waiting for programs. Snappy performance aside, it will undoubtedly save time and increase efficiency. Kind of like driving fast (to an extent).

 

Ok, lets say you spend $600.00 for the Drive, you have to determine if the savings is worth it to you. Without factoring time for conversion, if you have it for 4 years and save 60 seconds a day, every day, booting and loading programs and shut down you then save a total of just over 24 hours over the 4 year period. so if your time is worth more than $25 per hour to you then the SSD is a deal.

 

Or you can spend $240-$290 on one (80gb Intel X25-M G2), and save 30 seconds per day (boot up), and depending on your gaming - perhaps up to 10-15 minutes a day....

 

Agreed, you can save alot of time thereby increasing the value. I was just trying to give an example. It may not be much time but it adds up and can over the life of the product make it well worth the investment. Other things factor in as well, such as customer satisfaction in a business enviorment etc.

I know the price seems a bit high right now but the SSD is a huge perfomance upgrade for most any system. One that can't be touched by most any othr upgrade. You could double the ram, CPU speed and cores on the machine and still not realize the performance increase in loading apps etc. The price right now is being an early addopter but it is one that is well justified in many circumstances.

 

Just make sure that the storage offered by SSDs will be enough. If the space left for storing data is so small as to force you to constantly be moving data around from external drives, the time gains over a normal hard drive in data read/writes could be lost to mundane file management.