SSD: tests in older laptops

Test: ssd in 2 older W7 laptops, hp 6735b (2009) amd, Compaq mini 311c (2009) atom.

As price is getting within a slightly more excusable range, got a OCZ 120 sata3, out of curiosity & to see what would happen. Cloned C: os partition with Easeus from good working os, aligned, W7 detected ssd & updated drivers, trim enabled, all well & no problems. Original hd: Hitachi 320 7200.

-OS start-up time: good gains but I very seldom restart, form hibernate a small improvement, all in all no real gain in practice.
-Opening programs\files: faster, but compared to the time spent using the programs after opening, no real gain in practice.
-Music, film: no change.
-Browsing, streaming, email: no change.
-File copying: from within same disk & to other partition, very good improvement. But I seldom copy, so of no real use. To or from USB2 as slow as ever.

Result: obviously, a 512 ssd for a decent price in the latest generation laptop will be great+. In this case: is it worth fitting in some older laptop? no. Speedier? yes, but 98% for the stats & 2% for daily use. Do they work? yes. All in all, spent money, got 200gb less hd space, got less overall noise and less heat, and probably better battery times (didn't test), but in practice no worthwhile improvement in any of my daily use (as expected, but needed to know :0).

Attachment, the 311c atom wei.

 

Things you might want to add to your analysis are how much RAM each machine had and whether or not it did a lot of paging.

I took a 2007 MBP that was doing a horrendous amount of paging, due to low RAM, and put an SSD in it. It's remarkably faster in most daily functions.

In a vacuum, yes, SSD's are better all around. Most of your "not noticeables" have to do with CPU/internet speeds over the actual SSD itself.

 

+1 I got my Inspiron 6400 with just 1GB RAM and now it's much more responsive and snappy for everything after I chucked in a Intel X25-M 80GB (original HDD was a Fujitsu something 80GB 5400RPM ).

 

Hello, thanks for replying.

Zero paging, both laptops ram around 900mb in use \ 2gb available under (normal) testing and use with the SSD. Regarding internet, have a fast enough connection to stream hd video on both laptops (+ dedicated video cards on both), no problems & any ssd can obviously not help showing it faster than realtime :O) Webpages opens quite instantly, ssd or not, zero noticeable difference.

Am keeping the ssd in the 311c (my laptop for music streaming and youtube\video), but could very well have continued using the hd with no practical feeling of loss, the SSD speed increases here and there do not matter when f.ex. listening to music! If anyone spends their day shutting down and restarting the pc, constantly opening programs or constantly moving files between c and (partition) d, any SSD wil be great, I 'm seeing only very small gains for daily use as outlined in the 1st post.

IMO for most users (with older pc's), price vs performance vs capacity is way off. If high price + lower capacity is not in the equation, go ahead. But there's a great future, one day the ssd prices will really come down to earth and one will have benefits at a hd price. But a very good point came up, for those with little ram and doing much paging on slow hd's (not my case), paging to ssd should make a good difference indeed! Interesting discussion.

Probably the best bet for the laptops I've mentioned would have been Seagate xt's.

 

I use alot of programs with work that access the harddrive alot, I notice a real and substantial difference when I installed my intel ssd. boot time is almost instant. its awesome. windows 7 loaded in 8 min instead of like 30. its a great bang for the buck!

 

Here is a test I did nearly 2 years ago. It was on my Asus G73 using both a WD Scorpio Black and a Corsair Nova 128GB SSD. In particular look at post #14. http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...ssd-actual-performance-increase-over-hdd.html

As far as booting up, here is a link from way back when SSD's were not so common place as now, and what people were doing using a lot of tweaks, since the tech was still new to a lot of us. 10.389 seconds on my Asus G73.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...ur-windows-7-boot-time-tweaks-allowed-40.html

It is interesting in that some "felt" the snappiness, others could feel it was faster, and yet others could not see or feel any difference. I tested on a dual drive system, so everything other than human error would be the same. There is a difference, as long as you have a properly setup drive, good drivers and of course, it is aligned, which if you do a clean install of the OS, it should be. You may not always notice a few seconds here, a half a minute there, but over the day, there are time savings and speed differences.

All that being said, if your main use is email and web browsing, yeah, I don't think you will see anything out of it. I do a lot of photo and FTP work with it, and it absolutely makes a difference. That is where it will shine. Also, backups (which I do on a regular basis, 1 to my HDD drive in my laptops, 2 to externals, 1 at home and 1 at work) it makes a difference.

In the end, it all comes down to how you use it, why you use it and then, if you need it. I have 2 XT drives, and to me, yeah, they are better than a normal HDD, but nowhere close to what I can get out of my SSD's. Of course, YMMV.

Just some food for thought.

 

No the xt's are not near the speed of the true SSD, but are way ahead of even 10k rpm raptors. I am using a xt in my sons notebook to make it faster loading programs and boot times. going from 2 to 6gb ram will make a good difference too!

 

While the 'reponsiveness/snappiness' can be 'way ahead' of a Raptor/VRaptor, XT's are nowhere close to the work a VRaptor can do when the storage subsystem is actually heavily used.

(For eg. in image/video editing, true RAID setups for sustained (24/7) performance and/or 500GB, 1TB, 4TB 'scratch disk' use, or larger) when their small SSD-like cache isn't effective for the essentially 100% random workload presented to the storage subsystem).

Sure, it can make bootup/shutdown and launching programs faster than a VRaptor - but those speeded up scenario's are not the 'real work' that a workstation class storage subsystem is praised for either.

(Just a reality check for people who are not familiar with the Raptor line...).

 

About the 2 laptops mentioned in my posts here, they are A.F.A.I.K. sata1 with old mobo\drivers etc, max transfer speed is capped very low, so any 500MBs is totally out of reach, am happy to see around 125MBs read.

Startup to desktop ready (from after bios): amd 6735b went from around 30s to 20s, atom 311c from 40s to 25s. Some good numbers, but as I usually restart only on the 2nd Tuesday of each month ;O) = no real world gain.

What I see as at the big ssd gain here is the access times going from like 20ms to 0,4ms. So, yes, it all feels more 'snappy' when clicking on something, but with the usage pattern on these laptops, am spending 250x more time in any applications\files than opening them, so the overall real gain in time is absolutely minimal.

Of course, it'll be ssd for the next laptop, either a 512GB gets down to a decent price, or something like a 120GB+ (msata maybe) for os\programs combined with 500GB+ spinner for storage.

 

I have owned raptors so I know all about the reality of them...

 

To finish off, here are some crystaldisk results from the 311c atom N270, 5400 vs ssd.