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    Anyone Using An SSD In A Vostro 1700? - How is it?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Clunk, Oct 25, 2008.

  1. Clunk

    Clunk Newbie

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    Hiya folks,

    The bottle neck for the hard drive on my Vostro is driving me mad, so I'm going to try an SSD.

    I was just wondering which drives people have been using and do they really get rid of the bottle neck? Photoshop/image editing type stuff are what I'm keen to hear about :)

    Specs are Vostro 1700/T7200/120GB 5400rpm/4GB/Vista x64/8600GT.

    Thanks. :D
     
    Clunk, Oct 25, 2008
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  2. gengerald

    gengerald Technofile Extraordinaire

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    When you say bottleneck...an extra 5 seconds when loading PS CS3?

    You have a low data density 5.4k drive (according to your sig), if you shift to a high density 500GB 5.4k or upgrade to the new 320GB 7.2k drive you will see significant improvements at a fraction of the cost of an SSD.

    High quality SSD's are expensive and with great performance. Low quality SSD's are cheap but have the allure while creating issues.

    I upgraded from a 80GB 5.4k to a 200GB 7.2k and it was ridiculous. Now on a 160GB 5.4k with my eee, it is a downgrade, but by no means awful. I still load up PS CS3 in comparable times to my G2S.

    I do a lot of video editing, image editing, encoding, etc. and the 7.2k drive is definitely a nice thing to have. Save your money: disable indexing, disable your page file as you have 4GB of ram, and upgrade to a 7.2k drive. You will see significant improvements. and will have saved a couple hundred bucks while preserving the capacity for lots of huge files.

    My suggestion: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136280

    My 2 cents...
     
    gengerald, Oct 25, 2008
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  3. Clunk

    Clunk Newbie

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    Thanks for the reply :D

    By bottleneck, I mean that as soon as there is any kind of disk activity while doing anything taxing the entire thing starts to choke and it's without a doubt disk activity that's the problem because CPU and memory usage are pretty low and I can hear the disk ticking away.

    I did consider a 7200rpm drive, but I had one in my last laptop (inspiron 6400 2GB) and that also ground to a halt when multi tasking, that's why I was interested in what kind of differences people had seen when they upgraded to an SSD from a 5400RPM drive :)
     
    Clunk, Oct 25, 2008
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  4. chrisdew

    chrisdew Newbie

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    chrisdew, Mar 18, 2009
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  5. Mormegil83

    Mormegil83 I Love Lamp.

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    I'm having a good time with my samsung SLC. It's quite a bit faster than my 7k200gb. it's of course dead silent and the metal casing on it acts as a heatsink for my stock drive LOL. It doesn't have the highest sequential speeds like some of the new MLC's but i can multitask the hell out of it with out losing speed. =)
     
    Mormegil83, Mar 18, 2009
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