Contemplating SSD upgrade in my T400?

I am considering buying an SSD on black friday or during the holiday season. I am hoping to spend around $200 and get as many GB as possible. Realistically I expect 120,128 and "maybe" a 160GB.

I just upgraded my T400 to 8GB ram. I know it is overkill but it wasn't much more than going from 3-4 so I went 3-8.

My computer booted in 85 seconds with 3GB ram and not it boots in about 65 seconds. (Maybe it was not that drastic but it was marginally noticeable) I feel like my computer is pretty snappy right now. How much of a difference will I see by installing an SSD? Are my price/GB expectations unreasonable?

 

BIG BIG BIG difference on installing a SSD. It'll be much more snappier then installing RAM.

As for price range, sounds pretty reasonable:

Newegg.com - Computer Hardware, SSD, Internal SSD, $100 - $200, 128GB

 

Another thing. What is the deal with all the firmware updates, etc? I feel like I know a decent amount about computers but nothing about SSD's.

I know you can't really run a defrag on an SSD. Would you ever need to or do the equivalent? Also, what is Norton Ghost? Why would an SSD come with backup software?

 

Firmware updates are just like bios updates for your motherboard. With SSDs, things are always changing. Firmware updates provide new features, fixes, and tweaks that can drastically change the performance of the drive.

An SSD is one of the best things I've ever done to my laptops, it improves the whole feel of the computer. Now when I use computers with mechanical drives, it feels like I'm going back to a PII...

No you can't defrag SSDs, and you don't need to since their access time is ~0ms. New drives perform trim which prevents slow downs, but that's done in the background so no need to worry.

Norton Ghost is a program that lets you clone one hard drive to another (aka make a duplicate). Some people like to clone their mechanical HDD onto their new SSD so they don't have to reinstall. This to me is a terrible idea because when you do it, it doesn't align the partition properly, and it doesn't give you a fresh starting point.

As far as SSDs go, I would recommend this drive since they are fast and reliable. It really does make a difference which SSD you get, so don't skimp or you'll be disappointed.

 

I agree, out of all the components to upgrade having a SSD will transform the speed and response of the system. My 4 year old ThinkPad T61 with SSD still outboots any spindle hard drive based notebook that boasts much newer architecture (such as Core i3's, i5's etc). It really is that significant, I find it hard personally to use spindle hard drives as a boot drive nowadays as I get impatient after having a SSD!

 

In case you didn't think about it, don't forget you can use a fairly small SSD as a main drive and put lots of stuff on an Ultrabay hard drive until large SSDs get cheaper. If you're moving to SSD only for performance, you needn't move all your data.

 

That's what I do with my SSD, install the OS and your most often used and favorite programs and put everything else on your mechanical drive. You have MUCH faster boot up/shut down(15 sec boot into windows compared to 1 min and 20sec with my HDD) and also the whole system feels much snappier.

 

SSD is the way to go,,not only do boot and shut off times decrease alot, anything running thru the drive..virus scans, clean installs, ect are much faster,From my experience,,read speed is 3 times faster, write speed 2 times faster. Samsung 470 Series SSD compared to Seagate Momentus 7200.4(w 16mb cache).

Cheers
3Fees