My Sandisk 32Gb (M1330) Solid State Drive Review

We seem to be crossing signals here....

I tried cacheman then realized it wasnt for Vista lol.

And Im waiting on the RAM...too expensive.

 

SSD's are the way of the future. I'm planning on picking one up once they come out with the higher capacity SSD drives (128GB+; of course, after it drops down to affordable prices). While fast, the lack of storage simply doesn't make up for the lack of true storage in my eyes.

 

An interesting and informative article...looks like lenovo wants to jump on board the SSD train:

http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=96

I found this quote amusing:

"the technology is currently leaning much more toward people saying that they’ve heard 200% performance increases and 8000% reliability improvement over traditional hard disk drive (HDD) technology."

 

Ok Finally got mine.

Surprise! Dell said it would ship out 10/12 but I got an email on 9/16 that said it was just shipped. I checked DHL tracking that night and saw it was in Sparks/Reno NV and it arrived at my office the next day! (yesterday)

First Impression
Awesome Screen! Much brighter on hi mode than all the other laptops in the office. (Fujitsu S Series, Dell D400, IBM T40, etc) BUT I sure can see what people are crying about with the 'sweet spot' viewing angle. If you move your head up or down just a tiny bit you can see the sweet zone change. It's like wearing those mirrored skiing sunglasses with the center fade. But since I'm using it on Hi most of the time and I sit right in front of it it's still awesome.

I am currently using it with only 1GB RAM and it seems faster than the D630 I just returned. It'l pro'ly fly when I get the 4GB I ordered last Sunday for $258 delivered. Also it is currently running a lot cooler that the D630 2.0Mhz. But I still need to load a bunch of software so we'll see.

Fit and Finish
It looks beautiful. Glossy and shiny. Easy to get fingerprints all over the kewl black exterior so it might look ugly as I'm using it. Might need to keep a polishing cloth handy. Same for the screen

The keyboard 'feels' cheap. Like it might break down the road. I do prefer the layout much better than the D630. Delete, Home, Page up/dwn and end are all easy access and logical. Same with the arrow keys.

Speakers sound great. Much better than the D630 or my D400

Love the SSD. Sure is silent. I'll run some tests on the speed soon.

Speaking of silent... My only two gripes so far are these
For some reason Dell set the drives up as follows;

C: Size 16.75 GB with 5.7 GB free space left
D: Size 10 GB with 6.46 GB free space

Is that a Vista requirement? I did not request a partition. It still doesn't add up to 32GB either. Any ideas?

The other thing is;
the high pitched noise coming from the under-side. (Not the fan or DVD) If you put our ear up to 'anywhere' on the back while on you hear an annoying high pitched or high frequency sound like the sound of a bad battery draining or a bad walwart like my old Dell plug. Even when you are not doing anything. Anyone else have this? I think this is a malfunction?

 

The sound you are hearing is cpu whine. I was able to fix mine by doing this: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=170252.

You don't need the 10GB recovery partition. If I were you I would just get rid of it since you are strapped for space as it is.

Enjoy your new toy (I have)

 

Cromag!!!!!! Finally!!!

Bo a complete reinstall; follow my directions below. Consider going to 64Bit like I did. Its great. There is a thread by Trebuin that will walk you through it. There are all the drivers exceot Soundblaster available.

The 'squeal'...is just that. If its that bad, send for a replacement and chance it. Remember, you get to keep yours and decide which is best when the new one arrives.

As far as the partitions, when you repartition for MD3.3, allow it to a default partition. It will give you everything; there is actually just over 30Gb available, not 32.

 

I guess ppl think that my cpu whine fix is a joke. It's for real - don't send your system back for it if you can fix it yourself.

For some reason, the intel drivers or vista doesn't enable power management on the USB root hubs. Just enable the power management and the noise definitely goes away....

 

ahh! You guys are great! Thanks for the info, I'll work on it over the next couple of days

 

Every one of the below tweaks is good for that system except...Turbo memory or any memory stick is useless because your access time on a SSD is already about .2ms.

 

Update info

I installed a few programs and did some testing.

Since my new m1330 with SSD is silent I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to tell if some malware was accessing silent new SSD (Solid State Drive) so I looked around for a tiny program that would let me know.

I found a tiny program called Diskmon. It can be minimized to sit in your taskbar and show green when the SSD is accessed to read or red when it is accessed to write

Diskmon v2.01 243kb freeware app
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/diskmon.mspx

Problem is that it is flashing red approximately every two seconds.

I used the excellent Vista Perfmon to check out what exactly was hitting the

drive so often and it looked like mostly system stuff. Minimal amounts like 2-

30k, but often.

Does anyone have any advice about this?


My System

*** DELL XPS M1330 ***
Intel Santa Rosa Centrino Core 2 Duo
Processor T7300 (2.0GHz/800MhzFSB, 4M L2 Cache)
Memory 4GB DDR2, 667MHz
Graphics Card 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
13.3 Inch Wide Screen WXGA TL WLED Backlit LCD with Camera
SanDisk SSD 32GB Solid State Drive, SSDR, Serial ATA, 2.5, 9.5MM, SANDI
Integrated Sound Blaster Audigy
8X DVD+/-RW Slot Load Drive

Microsoft Windows Vista Business Edition (Premium)
Property Value
Windows System Assessment
CPU Score 4.90 (Calculations per second)
Memory Score 4.80 (Memory operations per second)
Graphics Score 4.00 (Desktop performance for Windows Aero)
D3D Score 4.60 (3D business and gaming graphics performance)
Disk Score 5.80 (Disk data transfer rate)
Windows Experience Index 4.00 (Base score)

HD Tune: SanDisk SSD SATA 500 Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 49.4 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 59.9 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 56.1 MB/sec
Access Time : 0.2 ms
Burst Rate : 49.5 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 6.9%

 

BTW Thanks a lot for all the info. I did the clean install and gained a lot of space. I installed the 4GB RAM upgrade and filled a SD card with a bunch of portable freeware utility apps.

These are new to me but make a lot of sense. check out www.portablefreeware.com