Best upgrade for older laptop?

I'm looking to upgrade one of my older laptops. I have a thinkpad x61 tablet w/ a convential hard drive. I'd like to make it as snappy as possible, would a SSD drive significantly improve loading times, or should I just dump it and go for an ipad 3?

 

If all you are doing is web and email.. the iPad would be the way to go.

If you want to upgrade the laptop, even a cheap SSD will do wonders.

 

It would be better, but given that the x61 tablet only has a plain SATA interface, make sure you don't spend extra $$$ for a SATA III based drive if you can find a cheaper SATA II based drive.

 

X61 can be flushed to use SATA 2

 

Even so, any extra $$$ for SATA III would be a waste - assuming you can find bargains for SATA II based SSDs.

 

There's two things you can try and both will help. A SSD will definetly help out make things smoother but you will find this very expensive for the capacity you're getting. The other option is to max out the memory though I think 2GB for the limit in your case? If its a PM945 chipset then if I remember it was 4GB supported by only 3GB visible due to its design.

Either way, memory --> cheapest and still viable, SSD --> expensive but the most visible improvement in terms of speed.

 

Is it physically possible to fit an SSD into an older laptop? I didn't think it possible. I thought that any laptop, new or old, that does not come configured with a slot for an SSD would not be able to accept an SSD. In other words, I thought the only computer that can accept an SSD would be a computer that came straight from the factory with an SSD already in place, a computer designed to accept an SSD. It seems to me that there would have to be a slot for an SSD. Put another way, I have an old 2003 Dell Inspiron laptop and an old 2006 Dell desktop. They were both made before SSD's started to take off. Is it really possible to bolt on an SSD into the body of two old computers without performing some sort of magic trick because they did not come from the factory with slots for an SSD.

 

No. That is incorrect.

A Solid State drive (SSD) is not a card that fits within a particular slot. It is in the same 2.5" form factor as most laptop 2.5" platter based disk drives. Note, an SSD should not be confused with an SD flash card or mSata Flash drive. Those *do* require particular slots if they are to be used w/ out any adapter within your laptop.

Getting back to the topic, as mentioned, SSDs are in the same form factor has a platter based HDD. To your computer it acts and behaves exactly like a platter based disk drive, and fits in the exact same spot as those drives (again, assuming it is a SATA based controller within the laptop). About the only thing you need to worry about is height. The most popular height for 2.5" disk drives is a bay that is 9.5mm high. However, some computers allow a drive of 12mm tall. However, I think the majority of SSDs are of 9.5mm high (or smaller - in which they come with spacers to fill the 2.5mm gap).

So, in the case of the x61, or even a couple of Dell laptops. If the computers support SATA, then they might support SATA SSDs. At that point, it is up to the computer's disk controller.

In regards to the controller, you need to pay particular attention to what type of SATA controller is in your laptop, as there may be issues with differences in technology. So, SATA II was designed to be backwards compatible with SATA I, and SATA III is supposed to be backwards compatible with SATA II. But, I don't know if SATA III is backwards compatible with SATA I, and also, some of the early SATA I adapters were not fully SATA I compliant. I've seen reports of certain SATA II drives having problems with the SATA I controllers due to some of these design incompatibilities. To straighten this out, you would need to contact the manufacturer of the computer or disk drive controller or gamble and try it out for yourself.

HTH

 

An SSD is just a hard drive. Same Form-factor, same connections (that is, if its SATA). They are completely interchangeable.

No magic, no drivers, no proprietary anything..

All SSD (that i have seen) are SATA, As long as you have an SATA interface, you are golden;

 

I didn't even need to read your post. Just from your title, I knew that the answer would be "get an SSD."

If you want to know what an SSD can do for older laptops, check out my signature. Especially the last one, where I do a side-by-side comparison against identical drive images (SSD vs HDD) on an older Core 2 Duo-based laptop.

This is inaccurate. Buy a drive because of fast random read speeds, not because of SATA2 / SATA3 support.

The SATA2 or SATA3 interface only determines maximum bandwidth. But you only hit that when you do sequential read/write speeds. A SATA 2/3 drive will max out at a maximum sequential read speed of ~250MBps / ~500MBps.

However, 95% of the data access patterns for a drive are random reads. Random read speed is the closest benchmark that measures performance in day-to-day activities, including application load times. Random read speeds on modern SSDs max out at around 80MBps, which does not saturate either SATA2 or SATA3.

The drives which coincidentally happen to have the fastest random read speeds also coincidentally happen to have SATA3 support. While your sequential read times may be maxed out at ~250MBps on your SATA2 laptop, you will still enjoy the benefits of higher random read performance (and thus, better performance for 95% of what you do with your laptop).

 

Yes, a SSD with high read IOPS will definitely improve it's performance. You want to flash middleton's Ultimate bios to get full SATA-II performance out of your X61t. A SSD will be a cheaper upgrade than a ipad3.

 

Perhaps, but it really depends on how the drive is used for sequential usage or not. But in the general case, Random Reads are important. Regardless, the point is moot as there are not too many SATA II drives left. In fact, of the drives I just looked at on newegg/amazon SATA III was cheaper.

 

Yeah, they cleared out the II stuff over the last month or so. Some of those Vertex Drives were going for under $1 a gig.

 

They make pata ssd's as well.
Not very large capacity and rather expensive for their size, but they exist.

 

I wouldn't buy one even if it were 10 cents/gig.

 

I used to be an OCZ hater too... Now they have a firmare update that fixes 99% of the issues.