Should I upgrade from Intel 320?

I'm still using the few year old Intel 320 in my sig. I don't really need much more space and my notebook use is pretty basic, email/internet/movie/Office. I don't think for that I'm going to notice any difference since I didn't with a Samsung 830. The one area I find the notebook to be slow is hibernating. Do I want a drive with fast random or sequential performance to make that faster?

 

With an SSD, why do you want/need hibernating? Shutdown/startup is just as fast (as hibernating) imho - and much more reliable.

Which O/S do you have? How much RAM? 64bit O/S? Are all your TP driver's up to date?

I've just updated one of my TP's to the latest Intel display driver (HD 4000 Version xx.3345) and experienced a noticeable responsiveness increase (as one example).


As an experiment:


Temporarily (or permanently; if your workflow/programs allow for it):

Disable System Restore.
Disable the pagefile.
Disable hibernation (elevated command prompt: powercfg -h off).

Now (making sure that you have disabled all sleep/hibernation timers);
Shrink the C:\ partition to as small as the system will let you (it doesn't matter how much free space you leave: you won't be doing any work during this time).
Create a new partition with the newly created 'unallocated' capacity.
Format the new partition and leave the system like that for at least an hour (this will allow the system to perform a proper TRIM pass on the unused space).

After leaving (and not using at all) the system for as long as you can (two hours highly recommended), you can now delete the partition you created, re-enable the hibernation file (if you really want it; powercfg -h on), re-enable System Restore (waste of processing power and capacity, imo) and re-enable the pagefile (if your programs complain/crash and/or you have less than 8GB RAM).


If I'm not mistaken; you should see a huge increase in the responsiveness of your system again (in any/all uses). Even better would be if you could leave 30% unallocated permanently (but only after you have taken the above steps).

Let us know how it goes.



And btw; no, I would not upgrade in your situation... (at least not to speed up hibernation).



Good luck.

 

Hibernating with an SSD is kinda pointless, that and with hiberfil.sys, you do alot of unnecessary writes to your SSD as well as eat up basically your RAM amount to your SSD space. Sequential performance is very little real world usage, 4k is more important, which the 320 series should have a decent 4k speed.

 

Hibernating usually takes the same amount of time as shutting down, maybe even a little longer.
What might work better for the SSD is finding a program that remembers what you were working on before shutting down and then loads it on the next startup.

 

Something like what Vista did. I never owned it, but just fixed my neighbors computer and saw that it would save and shutdown - remembering what was on the desktop for the next startup.

I might be wrong - it may be hibernating, but don't think so. Actually have to go into the shutdown menu to get a clean shutdown.

Maybe just something simple that runs a script and the program can do that without much interaction from the operator.

Windows 7 almost negates the need for that feature.

 

simple recommendation: use sleep, or shutdown, the hibernation in-betweener is pointless, like tilleroftheearth mentioned, startup/shutdown is as fast as hibernation, true for my single plextor m5m, raid0 m5m, samsung 830 and ocz vector (i tried them, they are just that quick on cold/warm boot, on both window 7 and 8)

 

Update to my post earlier; just had a chance to look at that machine and Vista doesn't have that feature, it was something else entirely.

So Pin those programs to the task bar and Pin the documents to those that you'll need often. Put programs to start every time into the Startup folder.

 

The reason I use(d) hibernate isn't for pure boot and shutdown speed vs. shutting down and restarting. The latter is much faster. But there is a utilitarian reason to use standby or hibernate. If you have many applications open and are in the middle of work in each of them, this allows you to pick up where you left off.

In any case, I was over-estimating how much power stand-by actually uses and that was the reason I'd hibernate. I measured it and it's only 0.2 W/hr. Where I used to use hibernate when the machine would be off for a long time, I'll just use stand-by all the time. The only time I'll have to use hibernate going forward is when swapping batteries.

I think I'll stick with the 320 too. For day-day use it's plenty good still.

Thanks to everyone that responded.

 

I was going to say that for business reasons, needing to move fast, then hibernating is just a another cost if it wears out the SSD just a little sooner.

I took out this line from the previous post because you mentioned it was slow to hibernate, but if it is faster than the alternative then for sure use it when needed.