HDD or SSD?

I am buying a Malibal Lotus Series (Rebranded Sager NP8150). I need to make a decision whether to buy SDD or HDD. More specifically:

500GB 7200rpm 2.5" SATA 300
-or-
120GB Intel® (510) SATA III 6Gb/s SSD2 Drive ($+260)

What are the advantages of the SSD as the HDD has much more space (500GB)?

 

It all depends on what you do. Gaming? Stick with a fast 7200 rpm HDD. Constantly copy files or do alot of things that access the drive all the time? Consider an SSD or SSD/HDD hybrid drive.

Just know with an SSD, you will be living with limited hard drive space, even if you just game. They are significantly more expensive per GB than a conventional hard drive. The up side is they are more durable due to shocks/trauma than a traditional hard drive, some use less power than mechanical drive, you get much faster boot up times, and Windows overall is more responsive.

 

FWIW, I just ordered the same laptop and pondered the same choice. Ulimately, I knew I wanted an SSD, but I considered either taking the easy route and getting the Intel SSD - then buying a HDD and caddy for storage or saving some $$ and putting off the SSD until later.

The compromise I came up with that saved my some $$ was to go with the standard 500GM HDD, buy a Crucial M-4 128GB and an eBay caddy. The SSD and caddy should be here before the laptop, so I'll do a fresh install of W7 on the SSD and put the HDD in the caddy before I ever fire it up.

By doing it this way, rather than spending $260 for the SSD, I spent $229 for the SSD, HDD, and caddy.

Hope that helps.

AM.

 

Thanks for the info, I'll go with the HDD.

 

The advantage of an SSD is that you get a transformative computing experience. Your computer feels "snappy" and "crisp".

Have you ever had an experience where you launch some program, but you sit there waiting for your computer to catch up, while you listen to the mechanical Hard Disk Drive thrashing away? You never get that with a Solid State Disk. Everything is instantaneous.

Check out some of the videos in my signature, for an idea of what kind of performance you get. An SSD is exactly like a Ferrari... they are small, they are impractical, and they are expensive. But if you want performance that has absolutely no equal from any other product, then you will want to get an SSD.

 

@kent1146 I just watched the video. Amazing. The only issue now is $/GB and GB capacity. Maybe sometime in the future I will buy a SSD and switch my HDD for it. I'll wait a year and see if the price goes down for the SSD.

 

If you look at the trend in the past year or two, that hasn't been the case yet. Drives are getting faster, but price has hardly dropped.

That'll eventually change, but a year might not be long enough for that to happen.

 

I'd say if you have the money to spend, always get the fastest SSD possible. I've never regretted getting mine 2 years ago

 

If you either don't need the DVD player or have two HDD bays, then you can easily get a low capacity SSD, 60GB to 120GB depending on your needs, as a boot drive and use 500GB 7200RPM to store data/install games.

 

I use 40GB ssd as a boot drive and app drive. Everything else including games go onto my 500GB hdd in cady.

As for now, with all office programs installed + trimmed down win7 + adobe suite, I've 20GB free space left. Enough to throw in 1 game.

SSD is awesome, I was thinking to upgrade computer, but after getting SSD I got enough performance boost I think I will keep this laptop for another year.

 

I just bought the laptop a couple hours ago.. If I were to now buy an SSD drive would it be possible for me to remove the ODD myself and replace it with an SSD?

 

Yep and the process should easy as well. Remove HDD, install SSD, install windows and install the drivers/programs.

 

Optical Disk Drive not the HDD.

I was looking at this 40GB SSD: Corsair Force CSSD-F40GB2-A 2.5" 40GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

On the Malibal website under the ODD section it said for $X you can buy a HDD caddy which can be swapped with the ODD for a second hard drive. Do I need to buy a HDD caddy and put the SSD (that I supplied a link to) in the HDD caddy and put that in the computer or does the SSD just go in without that caddy?

 

Yes, you could technically do that. But you don't want to.

You want your SSD to be the internal hard drive of your laptop, because that is what you will be using to boot your OS and run your applications. The ODD caddy (or an external USB enclosure) should be used to connect a slower mechanical HDD for bulk storage purposes (videos, music, etc).

And $100 is far too much to be paying for a 40GB SSD. You can easily find something like an OCZ Vertex 2 60GB for the same price.

 

Couldn't I switch the boot drive?

Also I thought the performance difference in SSD vs HDD is because of the higher read/write speed of the SSD. I just saw an SSD for 285mb/s read and 275mb/s write while the hard drive had a 300mb/s data transfer rate.

EDIT: I know it's easy to swap the ODD for SSD/Hard Drive but is it easy to swap the internal hard drive?

 

The "perceived" performance gain is from latency/response time and 4k/8k writes.

Sequential read/writes are pretty useless statistics for general use.

 

I don't know if your BIOS supports swapping boot drives.

But that isn't the point... the point is, that you always want your primary system (boot) drive to be the internal drive. The simple reason is because you want to be able to boot your system, regardless of whether you have the ODD caddy in or not. If you put your SSD in your ODD caddy and boot of of that, then you are forced to always leave that ODD caddy in your laptop. You will not ever be allowed to remove that ODD caddy as long as your laptop is turned on.

The numbers you quote are Sequential Read/Write speeds. Everybody pays attention to those, because those are the "big" numbers. However, Sequential Read/Write doesn't mean very much in terms of real-world performance.

The real number you should pay attention to get an indiciation of real-world performance is Random Read 4KB speeds. 95% of the data access patterns for general usage & gaming on your computer use a Random Read pattern (and not Sequential Read). This is why SSDs absolutely kick butt when it comes to actual real-world performance.

From Anandtech's Article about the Seagate Momentus XT


Those tiny numbers down there for the mechanical HDDs are 0.7MBps. An SSD can hit 50MBps - 80MBps Random Read speeds without breaking a sweat, and ask for more.

Varies from laptop to laptop, but it shouldn't be too difficult. The general idea is:
(1) Open up your laptop. Remove the existing HDD, and swap it with a new SSD.
(2) Connect your HDD to your computer using an external connection method - an Optical drive caddy or an external USB enclosure.
(3) Use a drive imaging software tool like Acronis TrueImage to clone the data on your HDD onto your SSD.

You don't have to go through steps #2 and #3. But doing so will save you the effort of having to re-install the OS and your applications. If you do choose to go through the trouble of #2 and #3, then you can just boot directly off of your new SSD without having to reinstall anything.

 

So since I already bought my laptop I might just take out the internal HDD and put that in a caddy for the ODD location and then place the new SSD into the internal HDDs original location. That way I don't need to call the laptop company and ask to change the HDD to SSD. Anyway I like buying the SSD myself.

 

Yes. You got it.

This is simple enough to do, that you will be able to do it yourself in 10-20 minutes. Asking the laptop manufacturer to do it for you will be expensive, and an unnecessary inconvenience.

Edit: Out of curiosity, I looked up the manual for your laptop (Sager NP8150). The manual has steps on how to swap out the hard drive yourself, in Chapter 6. It is even easier than I was thinking... it will literally take you 2-3 minutes to swap the SSD in.
Manual is here (bottom of page): http://www2.sagernotebook.com/pages/notebooks/download.cfm?ProductType=8150

 

Thanks for the link. Yah I heard the Sager notebooks are extremely easy to customize.