Asus N81 SSD upgrade help

Hey guys, so Im pretty happy with my laptop as is. Its a Asus N81Vp. But given that I plan on sticking with it for a while I wouldnt mind removing the optical drive and adding a SSD.

I've found this:
2nd Drive Caddy, ASUS N53, N61, N71, N81, N82 (2nd HDD or SSD) [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU] - $44.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

Which claims to work with my laptop. Does it seem at all legit?

Anyway, the other aspect I would like to improve is battery life. I understand adding a SSD increases battery life some? Currently I probably get ~2hrs out of it give or take, anything else I can do to help the life? I dont think Asus offers anything larger than a 6 cell battery for it.

Right now I have about 50gigs worth of OS and programs on my C: in addition to my D: partition. I dont mind dropping the coin on a good SSD since I can probably transfer it to my next laptop anyway. Ive been looking at these:
Newegg.com - Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1CCA 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

I hear the crucial ones are consistently ranked well. Although I have no idea if I can support SATA III in which case there is a slightly cheaper one I believe that doesnt have the 6Gb/s interface.

Does it seem like Im on the right track? Anything to avoid like the plague or something I should do while Im at it, RAM?

For the record I dont really game at all. My primary concern is doing school work in MS office, browsing the interwebs and running programs like Solidworks or other CAD, Photoshop etc. It would just be really nice to have programs behave very snappy and get some extended battery life.

 

If your notebook is anything like this:

See:
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4896&review=asus+n81+n81vp


Then an SSD will not give you any appreciable extra battery life from what you can get now. On the contrary, with both an SSD and a HDD both active, your battery life will get worse, I believe.

The one to avoid like the plague is the Kingston V+100 series drives - not only will they kill your battery faster, they will also last much shorter than almost any other SSD because of the very aggressive Garbage Collection (GC) their controller implements.

The GC on that SSD does ensure that the drive will perform consistently fast, no matter what workload you throw at it. But this is at the expense of power consumption and a high Write Amplification (WA) which drastically shortens the life of the nand chips.

To extend your battery life I would recommend 8GB RAM, using the Power Saver power profile option, decreasing your screens brightness as much as you can (while still being able to comfortably work on it), turning off wireless, bluetooth and any other options that you don't need directly and using a program like ThrottleStop to decrease the cpu voltage and/or throttle the cpu, the chipset and limit the computer to a certain (low) multiplier.

The most power effecient SSD's are probably the Samsung's, but if I got your notebook right (link above) you will maybe get an extra 10 minutes or so even with one of these Samsung SSD's.

The RAM plus the tweaks above should get you almost double what you can achieve now - but don't expect to do any high powered work with the notebook set up for long battery life.

The reason your notebook won't see a huge increase in battery life with an SSD is because of the higher end discrete gpu and the equally higher end cpu. If you had a lower performance cpu (or better yet a low voltage version) and integrated graphics, you might see a 1/2 hour increase in battery life or more... with a very power effecient SSD like a Samsung.

Good luck.

 

Thanks, yes that is my laptop.

I think I may hold off on increasing my RAM. I guess bottom line is that this laptop wasn't really meant for long battery life. It's not a killer, but it would be nice.

So what is the difference between this SSD and the one I linked previously?

I think I may just start off with one of those and see how the computer acts. I imagine it should be what Im looking for and Ill probably be happy.

My understanding is that the life of the SSD isn't a huge concern? Ive read some posts where people state that they write a lot on it and it would still last 13 years or something. Is it something I should be concerned with? Ill move the page filing to my HDD and probably wont be writing on the SSD much.

Lastly, is there any way to clone my C: drive onto the new SSD or would it just be easier to reformat everything?

Thanks for the help.

 

You may want to reconsider about the RAM (at least until you try it for yourself in your own system/setup).

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/7088961-post26.html


I don't believe for a second that any current SSD used actively will last 13 years. At least not with anywhere near the same capacity/performance that it started out with.

It really depends on your usage if the drives you linked to will be the best match for you (btw, they seem identical to me...).

My RAW photography workflow makes a SandForce based Inferno perform worse than a good mechanical HDD (WD 500GB 'Black', A 500GB Hitachi 7K500 or a 500GB Seagate XT hyrbrid that I've partitioned and optimized.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-hitachi-7k500-benchmark-setup-specifics.html


The SSD I would buy today (if I was forced to... I'd wait until the Intel G3's come out) would be the Samsung 470 series.

The C300's will prove to be considerably slower in any current notebook with a SATA2 interface - they need SATA3 to really shine, and even then, the Samsung 470 is in a class by itself.

As for cloning, yes - there are many ways to do it including using Acronis software. However, it does make a difference to do a full, clean install on an SSD so that Windows sets itself up properly (including, but not limited to correct partition alignment).

See:
Samsung 470 Series 256 GB SSD Review (30nm) | The SSD Review


Good luck.

 

OK, thanks you've been amazing thus far. I must apologize for my noobness.

Looking into the Samsung it seems like a great drive and priced right too. About 250 for 128gigs. You mention the Intel G3, after some research it seems these are due to come out sometime in February. It seems people speculate the 160gig version will be anywhere from $250-300. Does this still seem accurate? If so I may just hold out for the G3 if it is supposed to be as good as everyone seems to think. I think it would be better given it will probably support SATA III 6Gb/s which would be good for future applications. I cant seem to find out if my laptop can accept SATA III or II for the SSD. Anywhere I should be looking?

Also, are most SSDs 12.7mm and under? The caddy I linked to can accept a max of a 12.7mm drive but I can't find too much information regarding size.

Your post has made me reconsider RAM. I have DDR2 and it is my understanding that DDR3 will not physically fit. I suppose I can just pick up some DDR2 notebook 4g RAM. Would it be noticeable to spring for 2x4g for a total of 8g or would just buying 1x4g be sufficient for a 6g total? This seems to fit the bill ya? My only qualm is that a new laptop down the line may not be able to take this RAM given it is DDR2? Oh well. For the record I absolutely kill my laptop with multiple windows and multiple tabs(10+) of chrome open and then run iTunes, word, CAD software on top of that. Id imagine the increase in RAM would be a benefit?

If I get the SSD I will probably just reformat, I have my D: drive backed up and can just download/reinstall most of my programs again anyway. So essentially I would just install the SSD and format Windows 7 on it, being sure to select AHCI in the bios. Then I could just have my C: drive on the SSD for OS and apps and storage on my 320gig HDD. I would follow these instructions as far as setting up the SSD. Do they seem good to you (3rd post down)?

Win 7 SSD - config-customize - windows-7

Oh and 4 posts down is a guy talking about not worrying about wear leveling. I guess this isnt sound advice?

Thanks for all of your help I really appreciate it.

 

That RAM module you linked to is the exact same one I bought a 18 months ago for three times the money (and I bought two of them). I would recommend it - especially at that price.

See this post to see what a difference 6GB made from 4GB (which was frustrating the user to no end...).

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/7080785-post34.html


As to any SSD 'tweaks' I would ignore them - especially as you will be installing a fresh copy of Windows 7 (which will take care of any 'tweaks' the SSD needs). At the least, I would not certainly not follow the advice on that thread.

As to disabling System Restore, I totally agree with that - SSD or HDD, System Restore is disabled the second I have logged into a fresh Win7x64 install.

Once again, your notebook does not support SATA3, all current notebooks (and all those that are known about that are coming out in the near future) are at the best SATA2, so for notebook use, there is no point in getting a SATA3 SSD - especially when such an SSD is known to be slower with a SATA2 connection (such as the C300).

More than likely, the Intel G3's will not be SATA3 - just for those reasons above - but what you will (should?) get is double the capacity for the same money you'd pay for half now.

I would wait - oh wait, I am!


Hope this helped?

 

b379,

Just wanted to state I was wrong thinking that the G3's would not be SATA3 capable.

Sorry! (But I'm so glad I was wrong!).

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/7092100-post8404.html


Cheers!

 

Except that those don't appear to be G3s...

 

I'm calling the 'G3's' in the sense that they are the next new Intel offering.

They can call them SandForce for all I care - as long as they don't have DuraWrite 'tech' and have the real Intel innards; I want a few.

 

Sweet. Thanks for all your help. I guess its just a waiting game now to see if the new Intel drives are within budget and perform better than anything else.

 

Well, the G3s that are supposed to be cheaper are supposed to be cheaper because they'll be using newer 25 nm flash, and the ones in the post are still using the older 34 nm flash, which keeps the price up a bit.

 

So my understanding now is that there are true 25nm Intel G3s coming out march 11 and new intel SSDs that are 34nm coming out March 1.

Should I just wait for the 25nm ones? Im getting antsy, haha I wanna get started on adding this stuff.

 

I would wait, if only for the possible price drops on older technology as the new drives come out (unless you want to go ahead and pay for the newer stuff when it comes out). SSD prices are kinda high right now due to the whole OCZ fiasco.