Worth upgrading to a SATA SSD in my netbook?

Note: I imagine this isn't the first time this topic has been posted. I tried searching the forums but did not find a similar thread.

I've got a Toshiba NB305-N310 netbook. It came with a 160gb 5400rpm SATA laptop hard drive.

I'm wondering if its worth upgrading to an SSD or not. I've worked with SSD's on half a dozen occasions and the speed/performance increase in desktops is insane.. I'm just wondering if putting an SSD in this netbook will be as much of an increase, if at all, because of the slow CPU? I'm thinking the CPU is/would be the bottleneck here...

Has anybody tried this? Between the possibility of increased performance, increased battery life, and removing all heat generated by the hard drive.. its pretty tempting to consider an SSD for this netbook.

 

Well, I haven't seen the 'insane' SSD speeds you talk about - not even on a desktop, but it is worth it for the other factors you listed - just make sure that you do get a power efficient one (not all SSD's qualify) and temper the 'increased performance' with simply an increase in 'snappiness' and you won't be disappointed.

Good luck.

 

An SSD does provide great benefits in system boot speed and overall system responsiveness - there was a huge difference between my old Hitachi 160GB 7200RPM drive and my current Intel X-25M G2 80GB SSD. In addition, the SSD used less power and was entirely silent, both of which also made a big difference to me.

However, do not expect an SSD upgrade to boost other performance that is CPU-bottlenecked, such as video playback, gaming, etc.

In the end, whether or not it is financially worth it is your choice, given those benefits.

 

Yes SSDs provide a nice boost on Atom netbooks.

The 250GB Seagate XT Hybrid will also be a good upgrade.

Here you can read what upgrading to a 7200rpm does for an Atom netbook:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...l-wd1600bekt-review-real-life-benchmarks.html

 

I put a Kingston SSD (SSDNow V series) into my Vaio Netbook (it too replaced a 5400 RPM Drive).
Nice boost in start-up, application loading etc. But regardless you'll still run into some bottlenecks with the limitations of the Atom chipset. Will it deliver your "insane speeds" - doubtful.
For me it provided a overall capability upgrade to turn a netbook into a functional business travel companion (vice lugging around my desktop replacement). Now it will actually perform within acceptable limits.
Would I do it again? - Yes I would, was a nice enhancement.

 

You are correct in saying this. It's exactly what I experienced; two things limited the overall performance of the netbook in my sig equipped with the OCZ Vertex.

~ The Atom cpu

~ Seems like the MoBo was capped somehow with the SATA speeds.

 

During normal usage the Atom doesn't really bottleneck the SSD, however multi tasking performance is bottle necked by the Atom, no matter what HDD/SSD is used.

 

First off, thanks for all the replies! I'm going to look into getting an SSD for this netbook. Since my Alienware laptop's (in my signature) hinges/screen bezel broke beyond repair and I'm not able to locate replacement parts for it, I went ahead and bought this netbook to hold me over until the next line of gaming laptops comes out. I use it pretty much 10-12 hours a day between work and sometimes at home. Even a slight performance increase is worth it for me.

I did read the link Phil posted to his review of going to a 7200rpm drive. That seemed like a pretty significant performance increase all around while using a little less power and still running cool. I may consider doing this upgrade instead of going to a much more expensive SSD.

I ran HDTune on my current Fujitsu 160gb 5400RPM drive and here are the results:


As you can see the drive is pretty slow... Even going to a 7200rpm drive should be a significant performance increase.

Have a lot to consider though. If I remember correctly, even XP w/ SP3 doesn't have TRIM support so I would probably want to go to Windows 7. And since you can't just go out and buy W7 Starter... I guess the migration to an SSD would be more difficult than I imagined.

 

How do you feel about the Momentus XT 250GB?

It delivers near SSD performance on your most used tasks while costing much less per GB.

The downside is a slight increase in noise and vibration when compared to SSD. That's why I recommend the 250GB that does better in this regard than the 500GB.

 

i personally weighed the option of ssd vs hdd as far as i was running a 160gb 5400rpm hitachi, and wanted to boost the performance and start with the harddrive.

i ended up going with a larger HDD and faster 7200rpm one of the reasons was becuase the price of the hdd is going down considerable and one of the reasons is becuase of the SSD. i purchased a 500gb 7200rpm hitachi for 45.00 now i used passmark performance test to test both 160gb 5400rpm and the 500gb 7200rpm, i ended up with a 77% increase in harddisk performance.

personally i would get a ssd but the price to gb is way too high right now, esp when you weigh in the larger hdd with faster rpm speed its a no brainer really. yes the ssd are faster and boot times are faster ect but i would rather have 500 to a tb 7200rpm hdd than a slightly faster ssd and only say 80gb

thats just my opinion

 

I think he was referring to the boot up times which are greatly improved over a conventional drive, but almost same results can be achieved with the XT drives

 

I'm looking into this now. I have no problem with hybrid drives, except for last time I read a review of one the performance increase was tiny or sometimes even worse performance than the regular HDD in the review.

Reading your review of the hard drives in your signature, it seems the XT is a really great drive. I see them on sale for $99 and they are about halfway between a good performing SSD and a 5400rpm hard drive like mine. Plus increased battery life (over HDDs)... I'm excited to see this. I'm definitely leaning towards this idea now because having a fair amount of storage is very important to me. My Alienware only has a 120gb HDD in it (I never bothered getting a bigger drive) and it was a constant pain as it was constantly full. I'm a gamer, I store a lot of data on my drives. So I could either spend a couple hundred on a larger SSD and get maximum performance, or I could spend less than one hundred on a hybrid 250gb HDD...

 

Yes, I was. Huge improvements in boot times, loading large programs/files, gaming, snappiness, etc over a standard 7200rpm 3.5" drive.

 

Ah, 'over a standard 7200 rpm 3.5" drive'.

That's why you think it's 'huge' (the improvement).

Thanks for clarifying where you're coming from.

 

The bottom line is you will see a noticeable increase in overall speed and responsiveness. You can get somewhat of a clearer idea of what the speed boost will be like by going to an Apple store or Best Buy and looking at a Macbook Air. Yes, its obviously more powerful hardware then your Netbook but you'll still get a better general idea of what a difference an SSD can make in a lower end notebook, as well as what the bottle necks are.

 

Just saw this thread and wanted to add my two cents. I have an MSI Wind U100 netbook with one of those recently released rebranded Microcenter 64gb SSD with a sandforce controller (it's an A-Data drive). I think if you can get a drive cheap enough, then it might be worth it, and I say that with a very careful might. The drive was $99 so I thought it was worth a try.

I had a WD 250 gb 7500 drive in there before and it took almost a minute and a forty seconds to boot. There would also be lots of drive activity going on after the boot so my thought was a SSD would make things boot up faster and there would little to no drive activity after. I was correct as that was the result with the SSD...But...

While the netbook does boot and shut down much faster, the bottlenecks of the cpu, gpu, and chipset seem much more pronounced with a SSD in a netbook. I just don't see anywhere near the responsiveness I see in my Thinkpads, not even close. When I installed the SSDs in my Thinkpads, the difference, at least to me, was quite pronounced. Not so with the netbook. Yes, I can run apps faster, but the difference between a notebook and netbook with a SSD is night and day. As pointed out in an earlier post by makaveli72 above, the speed appears to be capped by the mobo as well. So I say proceed with caution, especially if you don't feel comfortable spending the money needed to get a SSD. In a netbook one gets little return for the money spent on a SSD.

 

dlai,

Your experience clearly shows the reality of the role even a fast storage subsystem makes on 'real' performance.

The chipset is not limiting your SSD's performance (I'm pretty sure), nor it's effect on how much work it can do.

That is the cpu, RAM and O/S that directly controls that. Always.

Any real 'Work' is never done on a storage device: it is done by the CPU + RAM. Always. The O/S plays a part by being as optimized as possible, but also by allowing all the resources (x64 bit, for example) to be fully used/exploited by the programs we use.

While a fast SSD on a netbook will initially seem impressive, just like on a faster platform, all it is offering is 'snappiness' and not an increase in actual productivity.

The best reasons for an (appropriate) SSD in any portable system are:

less heat issues (not 'none'),

less drop/vibration concerns (again, not 'none'),

less power consumption (depending on the specific SSD in question vs. the specific HD it was replacing).

Anything else is a bonus.


If the above possible advantages are of paramount importantance to someone, then the 'investment' in an SSD is worth the cost.

Simply because we have no other alternative at this time.

 

Don't forget the performance improvement. An atom + SSD is way faster than atom + 5400rpm.

Upgrading to SSD just makes the Atom more of a bottleneck . The SSD itself is hardly bottlenecked by the Atom.

 

Is the Atom really the bottleneck on netbooks? I thought it was mostly the IGP? Cause XP runs fine on P4 @ sub 2.0 GHz speeds, and most of the Atoms are dual cores ~ 1.6 GHz. I suppose half the netbooks now run Win 7 Start. But most netbooks are like GMA950 which has like 32-128 MB VRAM if that. I would know as I had an ASUS 900HA and I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB and it was still terribly slow.

 

Depends on what you're doing. Sometimes the memory is the bottleneck, sometimes the Atom.

An 1.6GHz Atom performs like a 800MHz Pentium M iirc.

I would not expect the IGP to be a significant bottleneck for normal usage on a 1024 x 600 screen.

 

Hrm well that's odd. My friend said he could play HL1 based games on his original ASUS EEEPC 700 series around 30 fps. I can't break 20 frames for my 900HA which has GMA950 higher than the older GMA900.

700 | 900HA

Celeron M @ 800 MHz | Intel Atom N270 @ 1.6 GHz
512 MB DDR2 400 | 2 GB DDR2 667
Intel GMA900 | Intel GMA950 (64 MB enabled in BIOS)

 

I'm not sure how that's related. For normal usage the IGP isn't a signifcant bottleck. Gaming is a different matter.

 

Well yeah but somehow GMA950 < GMA900?

Anyways I found even with 2 GB RAM GMA950 can't even play 480p Youtube smoothly. It is completely choppy. Which is why I sold my netbook, after having an uber i7 gaming rig, netbooks are unbearably slow.

 

Yes the Atom can be the bottleneck - try something that will multitask the processor between an Atom and another chip and you'll see the impacts.i.e. run full AV scan, Anti-malware scans and open several apps at the same time. Granted with the SSD, the Atom will do it (with a big of lag). Try the same on another system with a SSD and current processor - you'll see the difference.
Not saying Netbooks or Atoms are bad (i have one) - what saying is for me to turn the system into a usable travel companion the SSD did the trick. Before that it was watch the "little spinning wheel" while I waited for the processor and hard drive to do the task.
Now it can do what i require when travel - plus other folks see it operate (the speed) and it is usually the first question they ask - why is your netbook so much faster than mine?

 

J&SinKTO,

I have no doubt that your system feels faster with an SSD, but consider this:

Overall, I did this to the Timeline below:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/6723837-post163.html



Specifically:
I took a little $300, 11.6" Win7x64 Acer Timeline 1.2GHz 2GB RAM and a 160GB HD inside for a two week spin a while ago.

I increased the RAM to 4GB, short stroked the C: partition to 40GB, uninstalled all Acer junk and installed a trial of PD 11 Professional on it.

Within a few hours (yeah, 5400 RPM + 1.2GHz is soooo sloooow) the system was rivalling my i3, 8GB RAM, Inferno SSD based system in responsiveness.

This is with the stock mechanical HD.

The boot up time went from just over three minutes (what a joke, come on Acer! Stop installing Norton/McAfee/Eset viruses on new computers) to just over 30 seconds.

Opening Word went from almost 30 seconds to less than 1 second.

The most impressive 'benchmark'?

Pinning 10 apps/utilities on the taskbar and using the Windows + the 0-9 keys to open all 10 programs in less than 2 seconds.

(Hold down the Windows Key and pres 0 to 9 to open up the taskbar pinned programs in the order they are shown - to change the order, simply drag the pinned program to a new position).

Key optimizations count far more than simply throwing $$$$/hardware at the problem in my books. And this was all accomplished for less than $25 for the RAM.

An SSD would have made this system marginally quicker, at the expense of more than doubling the cost of the system (of the same disk capacity) and the benefits of being more robust than the mechanical drive inside is now.


My point with the above is that an SSD is not the only way to a responsive system. Sometimes a little bit of hardware (an inexpensive additional RAM module in this case) with some time/elbow grease is all you need.

(In the end, I returned this because of the poor battery life this system offered - 2 to 2.5 (avg) hrs before my tweaks above to 3 to 3.5 hrs (avg) afterwards - btw, I actually hit just over 5 hrs a couple of times with wifi off).

 

I too tweaked my netbook initially, fresh install of Win 7, upgraded RAM to 2GB (max in a Netbook). Turned off various features to increase the responsiveness. But, still would not suffice for what I needed with a travel companion. I work with large Excel and PPT files. Before the SSD, the Excel file took close to 40 seconds to open and process after the SSD approx 15 seconds to ready for use. The large PPT files (100MB+) would bring the system to a crawl. With the SSD, it opens and responds within seconds. Again based on what I need it to accomplish it did what I was after.(the tweaks alone would not do it). It was a budget version SSD knowing full well the Atom would be the bottleneck.
For my requirements, I would do it again.

 

I suppose but I'm assuming all the upgrades were half the cost? I think it's kinda silly dropping 150 in upgrades in a netbook worth 300. Now if you had an ION notebook maybe...which I was interested in.

 

For your requirements, I would say it was the best investment you could make too.

Just that your requirements are a little above what most netbook (Atom based) users demand of their systems.

(I'm curious to know what a ( partitioned) XT in such a system would feel like?)

Hey! How long is your battery life and which netbook do you have, specifically?

 

Bought a Sony W (earlier version with the 1366x768 screen) - needed/wanted the higher resolution for the Excel tables.
Was a nice price on closeout - around 400.00. Where I'm stationed we don't have much choice for what can purchase and almost no companies will ship the CTO models to an APO. So I go with what can purchase and take the upgrade path.
Again for what I needed and what had available it works. Would do it again. Now would I recommend that as the norm to others - probably not.
Battery life with screen on low will last 6.5 hours on an 80% charge using Sony's Battery care software.

 

To be honest, I found my biggest bang for the buck in my netbook was an SSD, over a traditional laptop or desktop. It offered four things I can't get from a traditional HDD:

(1) Much less power consumption = a lot more battery life. Of course depends on the SSD, but pretty much most of them are much better than an HDD. My Intel 80GB idles at 0.06W. Can't ask for much better than that. My netbook went from about four hours on HDD to well over five hours battery (5:15) with SSD (to 5% power and hibernate).

(2) Durability. No moving parts. Only thing that moves is the fan, and now the device most sensitive to shocks and drops now is the screen. For a netbook this is important because it's already small and light and more likely to get flung around, moreso than a heavier, larger laptop.

(3) Vibration. This is probably just me, but in smaller notebooks, typically a hard drive would put my hand to sleep even a short time it rested on the palmrest.

(4) Performance. While the system as a whole may bottleneck the performance of an SSD it is still also worlds faster than most any HDD.

Granted I'm not 100% sold on SSD's yet even though I've been trialing several of them. It helps, and for ~$100 for a 60-64GB I find it's worth it if you can have a secondary larger capacity HDD. Until 240-256GB SSD's are < $1/GB it's hard to justify the cost for a single SSD. I'm hoping to be able to pick up a new G3 Intel 320GB for about $400. But maybe that's a pipe dream.

 

Concur with all the items htwingnut mentioned also. (altho not my primary reasons those were nice side benefits as well).

 

One more thing to note is that you will see a much larger battery life improvement in a netbook over a typical laptop too. Mainly because a larger notebook with a dedicated GPU, the overall power consumption is much larger, so SSD will make less difference. In a netbook/compact notebook that burns maybe 10-12W total, 1W from a drive is ~10% of the total power consumption.

 

Yea, maybe when SSD prices drop (I've heard early next year) I'll pickup an SSD.. for now I'm pretty set on getting a hybrid drive.

 

The Momentus XT is a great drive. Running it in my Sager notebook right now. It's a fast 7200RPM drive to begin with, and obviously the SSD helps in many instances.

 

Astrogiblet, did you ever upgrade your Toshiba NB305? I just bought the cheapo Kingston V100 64GB For $49.99 after rebate and plan to put it in the NB305 to see if it helps with general snappiness/response of using the system. It has no files and I don't do much with it other than IE and firefox. Maybe a few online streaming vids. Will let folks know if it works out well.