SSD alternative review for low end systems

Hi,

Not wanting to spend a fortune on some of these amazing SSD devices I set out to find what improvement could be had on a low performance system with a very cheap device.

Battery life is everything to me. I use a c2d 1.3 CULV acer that goes 8+ hours on a 63wh battery.

I purchased a used Samsung 128GB MLC first gen device, the one with sub 100mb read/write. This replaced a 250gb WD 5400.

Load times of OS and applications are below. As you can see applications loaded in normally less than half the time.

250 hdd to 128 ssd, %/time-saved/seconds

Boot 38.00 to 20.50, 46% reduction
IE 1.50 to 1.50 0% reduction
Corel 14.00 to 2.98 78% reduction
Thundernird 4.00 to 1.43 64% reduction
Word 3.18 to 0.89 72% reduction
Media 7.53 to 5.16 31% reduction

Power consumption for typical tasks, w = watt

Idle 5.10w to 4.20w 17% decrease in consumption
Youtube 8.30w to 7.50w 9.6% decrease in consumption
Media 9.00w to 7.50w 16.6% decrease in consumption

This means on video playback I get an extra 1 hour 50 mins battery and have the file opened almost half as fast.

Overall the best upgrade I have ever done.

Regards.

 

I don't understand these numbers one bit - I assume these are mW but the values don't mean anything to me and a hard drive consumes much more than 5.1mW at idle (outside of sleep, the HDD drive should consume some 800mW). Can you clarify?

On CULV laptops, with the display turned down a bit, I could see a low power SSD (I know the Intels are incredibly low and run cool but much of the competition isn't) adding 1-1.5 hours of computing time to a UL30VT-A1 but outside of that, the CPU and GPU consume much more power and make a larger impact.

 

Opps, mw are total power consumption of entire laptop.

I have no way to isolate actual SSD consumption nor a desire to as looking at this drive as to how to affects overall system power usage, as this is what really matter to run time.

 

ps, 5.1 is 5.1w, not 5.1mw..... updated original.

 

My Acer 3810t with and undervolted SU9400 and 160GB Intel SSD can get above 8 hours on battery with the right settings.

 

So what runtime are you getting? 8 hours using it, 12 hours idle? This is in a 1810TZ? A 12" laptop that beats the Asus for likely a lower price would be nice. Even stock though, at idle you would be seeing 12 hours of idle battery life with your original hdd.

 

Hi,

Yes its a 1810TZ, 3GB ram version running w7hp.

Idle time has gone from 12 hours to 15.

Media player time has gone from 7 hours to 8 hours 50mins on the 63wh battery.

Regards,

 

Yes....fact is you cannot beat a Timeline with a SSD. Its an amazing thing to finally have a laptop that easily surpasses 8 hours on the battery with normal use and the speed of the ssd.

 

In my battery life tests I was shocked to find that the external pico bluetooth adaptor was consuming atleast 1w idle, and often 1.5w. On a full day thats that over 10% of battery life minimum.