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    Old Gateway NV53 laptop + Samsung SSD EVO840

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by meontheweb, Sep 2, 2014.

  1. meontheweb

    meontheweb Newbie

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    Hi - hope someone can help me.

    I've got an older laptop, a Gateway NV53:

    Processor AMD Athlon II X2 M500 @ 2.2GHz
    Memory 4096MB DDR2

    I recently purchased a Samsung SSD (EVO840) from Amazon and installed it - however I'm not getting anywhere the speed increase I was expecting. If anything the SSD is probably running 10% or 20% faster than the old hard drive that was in there (500gb).

    I also ran into another issue which was that the Samsung Magician software does not see the SSD.

    Does anyone know any updated drivers for this machine - for the drive controller/BIOS?

    Can anyone suggest any tweaks I may need to make in the BIOS for this drive?

    I realize that this is an older laptop and I need to upgrade - but for now it does what I need it to do.

    Any help is appreciated!
     
    meontheweb, Sep 2, 2014
    #1
  2. un4tural

    un4tural Notebook Evangelist

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    Drivers & Downloads

    no idea how much help it'll be.

    its probably sata1 or at best 2? it's really holding the ssd back, though usage in windows should be a ton snappier due to better performance for small files. essentially, mostly everything is bottlenecking the ssd...
     
    un4tural, Sep 2, 2014
    #2
  3. meontheweb

    meontheweb Newbie

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    You're right - it's probably SATA 1 at best. Guess there is no "upgrading" this ancient artifact.
     
    meontheweb, Sep 2, 2014
    #3
  4. ajkula66

    ajkula66 Courage and Consequence

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    Out of sheer curiosity: what OS are you running?
     
    ajkula66, Sep 2, 2014
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  5. meontheweb

    meontheweb Newbie

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    I'm running Windows 7 64-bit - just noticed some drives on Samsung' site, so am going to give those a try and see what happens.
     
    meontheweb, Sep 2, 2014
    #5
  6. un4tural

    un4tural Notebook Evangelist

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    it might help, or it might murder it, depending on ram usage, as it enables to cache stuff to ram (rapid mode), drastically improving ssd performance for the sort of every day random read/write stuff though you'd probably want more ram for it... samsung magician might help slightly with its ssd optimization stuff, but again it's being held back by the laptop, it is a great ssd and will be a great upgrade to whatever you'll get in the future. also samsung magician will show the sata version and some other data about it.
     
    un4tural, Sep 3, 2014
    #6
  7. meontheweb

    meontheweb Newbie

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    So finally got it working and am seeing a improvement in performance, but only so much I will get out of this aging laptop. Time to sell it and look for something better... the laptop could never recognize the SSD as an SSD but simply as another hard drive. :-(
     
    meontheweb, Sep 19, 2014
    #7
  8. TomJGX

    TomJGX I HATE BGA!

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    Yeah its AMD and easily 6 years old... So about 8 years backward compared to an Intel one... Time to upgrade :)
     
    TomJGX, Sep 20, 2014
    #8
  9. meontheweb

    meontheweb Newbie

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    LOL - agree. Laptop is tired and time to be retired. Will be donating it...
     
    meontheweb, Sep 22, 2014
    #9
    TomJGX likes this.