An SSD gift for my Y need recommendations

The stock 5200RPM drive is way too slow and can get a little bit on the warm side. I want to replace it with an SSD. Anyone have any suggestions. I was looking at this one in particular, but am unsure. Thanks.

 

good, but at the moment, SSD's are getting pretty cheap. You can get a sandforce one for $1.50/GB like here in this thread from slickdeals:

Micro Center 64GB G2 SandForce SF-1200 SSD For $99.99 - SlickDeals.net Forums

The sandforce drives are getting to be as fast(if not faster) than the intel ones nowadays. In any case, going from a HDD -> SSD(any of them) will be amazingly fast.

 

What about battery savings? I haven't really put this computer through its paces yet, but the battery meter estimates around 5 hours or so. Can I look to extend that, along with an extended battery?

 

You should see some battery savings... on a battery life of 5 hours... maybe 10-20 mins? I'm not sure how much energy a HDD takes to spin... But i guess you could buy an extended battery although they might be kind of expensive because sony has very limited life cycles for accessories

 

I'm more worried about the drive having to be spun down and back up again so many times, than just constantly spinning. With an SSD, I don't have to worry about that.

 

I wouldn't worry about the HDD spinning up and down. HDDs are still generally more reliable because of teething problems some SSDs have had.

I put a SSD in my Y and the performance improvement is huge. The improvement in battery life was slight. Achusaysblessyou said 10-20 minutes and that seems about right.

The Intel SSD you're looking at is a safe choice. You can find cheaper drives, and drives with better sustained throughput, but Intel drives perform well for real world usage and Intel has the market power to buy good quality NAND which should in theory be more reliable.

I got an OCZ Vertex 2 because it had killer benchmark scores and I've been regretting it ever since. These drives have a very poor reliability record. Also, the Sandforce controller compresses data as it writes, so it puts up huge numbers in benchmarks that use easily compressible data. But when you're working with incompressible data like most media files, performance is not nearly as good.

 

Cool, does anybody know of a good benchmark program for battery life?

 

Just install batterybar and watch your discharge wattage.

 

Thank you very much for the link, it's quite the nice app and I plan on buying it when my trial runs out.

Does anybody know of a good disk cloning program? I plan on just using that with the SSD, rather than installing Windows fresh again.

 

Acronis True Image

 

I'm going to move this for you to the hardware forum.

 

What notebook is the SSD for?

On a larger notebook you'll see very small battery life improvements.

 

Sony Y series, it takes a 2.5 drive.

 

OK in that case it makes sense to look for a low power consuming drive.

Sandforce drives aren't the lowest in power consumtion.

 

So I could see a big improvement in performance, both battery wise and speed wise. Any other suggestions besides the Intel one?

 

The Intel isn't necessarily very good for improving battery life.

Corsair Nova V128 uses less power.

Samsung 470 is also good.

 

Do they have any cheaper drives with a little less capacity? In the 100-200 dollar range

 

Corsair Nova and Samsung 470 are available as 64GB too.

 

I would not get a SSD that is less than 100GB if that is a single drive general purpose system. Extra unused space is key to performance and life of SSD.

 

I plan on using my external drive as my file storage, so the small space is not that bad.