Is My Computer Able to Use an SSD?

Hello, this is my first post. For those who do not care to read my intro or what I have to say, I have bolded the important stuff. Before I say anything about myself I have already read the SSD thread. This is a more specific question. I appreciate any help at all; I am trying to become more tech-savvy and figured a hard drive is a fairly easy component to replace as my RAM is already maxed (feel free to correct me!).

Anyways, my name is Michael; my computer knowledge is limited but my ambition and excitement and high! I am a senior in college and have a basic, working understanding of computer but have very little knowledge of internals. I am interested in purchasing a Intel X25-M SATA Solid State Drive and installing it on my laptop and have a few questions:

1) Is my computer CAPABLE of taking an SSD instead of a regular hard drive? I have: Gateway M1634U Notebook – AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 (2GHz), 4GB DDR2, 320GB HDD, DVDRW, 15.4” WXGA, Vista Home Premium


2) Is anything required of me besides opening the computer, removing the HD and then plugging in the SATA cables and reassembling the laptop?


3) Anyone know any sites that might give me instructions on how to do this?


4) Anyone know where I can find the best deal on the SSD?



I appreciate any help anyone offers VERY much and am happy to take any suggestions or comments! Thank you!

 

1) yes (you might want to switch to win 7 soon, vista works ok too tho)
2) Open up your notebook take your hd from the hd bay most notebook hd are screwed in a metal hd bay which you must use for your new hd. no cables need to be plugged in or plugged out, you slide in the new ssd (after you put it in the notebook's hd bay) and that's it, it's pretty straightforward you'll see (check your instruction manual you got with your laptop if you still have it or try to get a digital one pdf).
When you install your operating system on the new hdd it might be needed to run in ide mode (check your bios) windows installer will handle partitioning/formatting when needed.
Making multiple partitions on your ssd doesnt have much (speed) use tho.
For further help I suggest you look in the gateway area of this forum people are often quite quick in answering questions.
Also I'd suggest reading up on your manifacturers' site/forum (of the ssd) for user help/suggestions/tweaks to run your ssd to it's full potential like this one:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?p=318866#post318866

 

Wow thank you very much, I will check out the Gateway forms, I appreciate your help alot and look forward to getting the new drive in!

How do I check my bios to see if it needs to be run in IDE mode though?

Thanks again for the quick response!!

 

Well you can just try to run it with the new ssd as it is now and see if the computer recognizes the new hd (as in windows is able to install on the hd).
If not you can go into your bios and change your operating mode to ide (instead of ahci mode)

 

You won't need to run the SATA controller in IDE mode in Vista.
Vista has a generic AHCI driver.

 

Ah geez that's French to me. Two more questions:

1) Will I need to install drivers and all that jazz onto the new drive or is there a way to transfer everything on my old one to my new one?

2) Will I need additional cooling?

 

1) You won't need drivers for the SSD, but if you do a fresh load of Windows (which I would 1000% [not a typo, that's 1000] recommend, you will have to install all the other device drivers... along with the OS. If you're feeling really lazy, you can use a program like Acronis or Norton Ghost to image the old drive to the SSD.

2) No need for additional cooling. The laptop will run slightly cooler and get better battery life with an SSD than with a conventional mechanic hard drive.

 

ssds are normally cooler than your average hd by quite a margin (also they are much more power efficient).
I'd go, if I were you, for a fresh install of windows so that does mean reinstalling everything you had on your old hd.

 

oh nice we reply in stereo

 

Thanks to both of you, you've both been very helpful and prompt!

EDIT: And Im happy to see I got identical answers from two people.

 

No problem if there's something you want to know just ask on these boards or in pm.
Overall these boards are quite good for info and to ask questions I check them quite often myself for some new info/guides/tweaks/etc. it's quite helpful.
I'd recommend this site to anyone with a notebook who wants to squeeze the most out of it hehe.

 

It should be plug and play with Vista. Should take 5 mins to pop out the old drive and put in the new drive. Theres normally a compartment in the bottom of the notebook. Refer to your service manual for instructions.

You can image your current drive to the SSD but its well recommended you do a clean install.

 

Thanks flipfire, much appreciated. Three people agree so Im pretty sure I know what I have to do (and fortunately it seems to be very easy).

And thank you Athinu, Im thinking I might have to start using these forums. Im new to computers (well at least opening them up) and have been hoping to get into learning how they work for awhile. Seems to me that this forum should be valuable in learning. The response rate is incredible! Ive only been on a few forums before where I got good answers so quickly!

 

there are some great guides on here that explain how everything in the computer works. they were released say 6months ago. They should give you a good base!

 

the ocz forum is useless. you shouldn't a) apply tweaks to vista or win7, and b) need to apply tweaks to a disk that costs much more than an ordinary hdd. if you need to, then the disk was not worth the money.

most of the tweaks are placebo effects making you feel good and the system feel faster because you know you've made something. the other tweaks are for fixing old firstgen ssd's, which where crap (jmicron core drives)

 

Lol then we disagree, it's possible right?
So you popped in your ssd and didnt change any setting in vista?
Shouldnt you at least turn off (auto) defrag?
Prolly most of those tweaks aren't needed anymore but you can try them out to
see if they make a difference for min/maxers I'm reading conflicting posts by people
saying it does make a difference and others like you who say they don't anyway you should
see for yourself imo.
-edit- Oh and btw I was talking about the nbr forums not the ocz forums, altho the ocz forums are quite a good read too; support and firmware wise a lot of companies can learn something from ocz at least that's my experience.

 

Win7 is optimized for SSD use, defrag, prefetch and indexing is disabled by default. Im sure Vista also applied this as a patch/fix in windows update.

 

I've read that sometimes windows 7 doesnt disable defrag automatically (as in windows doesnt detect it's a ssd), at least that's what some people report.
So you'd still want to check it to be sure imo.

 

It doesnt actually disable defrag for W7, it just omits the drive from being defraged in auto schedule. This is whats causing the confusion. I believe W7 detects the spindle speed of the drive, which will be 0 for a SSD or when you run WinSAT.

But yes, its best to manually check that Defrag, indexing and pre/superfetching is disabled. Newer drives might not be detected as a SSD.

Windows 7 was supposed to use Intels NVMHCI (Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface) but it wasnt implemented as far as i know.

 

yes, popped in, installed, loved.. disabled autodefrag, loved.

any of those tweaks harms the performance of vista more than it gains, except in the special case of crappy ssd's that have to get tweaks to work at all (or even run the os setup!! remember the first ocz? you had to install to a hdd, and clone to the ssd, as it couldn't even install!!).

the only tweak you have to do for an ssd is not a tweak. disable auto defrag. why isn't it a tweak? because it's a simple accessible option of the os. tweaks == messing with the dark parts of the os. like the registry, or the device manager.

most of the tweaks are useless and independent on the ssd (superfetch disabling, pagefile disabling, uac disabling, indexing disabling), and are all ridiculous and wrong.
others that are for the ssd are not needed for any good ssd. the only tweak out of the whole forum is the defragmentation.

and thus, the forum is not just useless, but dangerous.


and i had different ssds. i know quite well what to do, and what not to. one thing to not to: never listen to anything from ocz. buy products from them, no problem. but don't listen to anything they state. it's all just because they want to sell you crap.

 

prefetch and indexing are not disabled by default.

prefetch (actually, superfetch) gets disabled depending on performance tests. they are depending on the ssd, still useful.

indexing still has to be on. nothing is remotely as fast as searching trough an index.

do you want to search trough gigabytes of data, or a 1mb index that is hierarchically organized so that you need maybe 10, 20 read accesses, to know where the data is?

indexing is nothing bad. people hate it since xp. no one knows what it's really good for.

 

The thinking is, dave, that with an ssd, and index is not needed due to the near-instant access times of ssds. It's the same reason defrag is disabled. With an ssd, the access time will always remain constant, despite fragmentation, etc.

With a traditonal drive, sure, having an index is VERY useful, because its performance is heavily dependant on the amount of files you have on the drive and the amount of fragmentation present on the drive.

 

no. index is still needed, as you still can't scan trough gigabytes of files in an instant. i'm talking of 100GB/s bandwidth here, or 100000MB/s that would be needed.

but an index delivers that bandwidth, as it's a presorted dictionary of all words (and other indexable things) in all documents on the full hd (INCLUDING CONTENT).

it's INCLUDING CONTENT.

yes, searching for a filename on an ssd is quite fast. but for some content isn't. and indexing delivers INSTANT CONTENT SEARCH.

searching without index is always O(N), searching with index is O(log(N)).

if searching trough 1000 files, checking each file takes 100ms, then searching without index is 1000x100ms.

if accessing the index for one iteration is 100ms, too (it's a file, too), then it takes log2(1000)x100ms, or 9.96x100ms.

so, for 1000 files, we're talking about 100 seconds against 1 second.

for 10000 files, we're talking about 1000 seconds against 1.3 seconds.

for 100000 files, 10000 seconds against 1.6 seconds.

you see it?

indexing performs just so much faster than anything else by design, raw brute force power can't ever beat that for large datasets (and your gigabytes of userfiles are VERY large datasets..).

 

davepermen, have you tried a program called everything? (first link in google usually)

 

Sounds cool. I'm sure it'll be very useful if I ever needed to search through my files for a specific word. Although I must admit it's not something I do very often - in fact I don't think I've done it in about 5 years.

I think I'm quite happy to wait for 10 minutes, instead of 60 seconds, every 10 years.

 

And what's the benefit you've gained now by turning indexing off again?

 

well, we talk about INSTANT, not 60 seconds. we talk about maybe 2 seconds to access the index and find the info you want.

and guess what? then you start to use it not every 10 years, but nearly always.

just like nowadays we don't think much, but just search in google to find some info.