hello to all hp dv7 6b51ea question

am new to this forum so hi first of all. Sorry if this post is in the wrong place.



I am awaiting delivery of a pavilion dv7-6b51ea, it has 8gb mem, a 1tb hd and a quad core i7 267qm 2.2.



I have been reading about solid state hard disks and am wondering 1, could I swap the primary hd from the machine for a ssd and if I did do this, even if it was smaller and just used for the os, would I see improvements in the speed of boot up etc,~? I believe this machine has 2 hdd so I was considering using a ssd for the primary os disk and the recovery partition and the second 500gb drive for data storage.



Is this possible, and if so would it bring improvements? Would cloning the original disk enable me to install my os to the ssd as i have no disks with machine just a recovery partition with the option to make a recovery disk.?



Lastly if I did any of this would it invalidate my warranty?



Thanks



Andy
...

 

The correct term is Solid State Drive (SSD) not solid state hard disk.

Yes, you can swap out the primary and see improvements in the boot up times and the overall 'snappiness' of the O/S with an SSD.

Although you could clone your O/S HDD to your new SSD, I would either simply create the recovery disks (at least there is no large, hidden partition that is wasting space and performance on your SSD then...) or, better yet, download the version of Windows 7 you have (legally) and do a clean install of Win7x64 to your new SSD.

Warranty? No, all this is user serviceable parts and fair usage - the warranty is still valid unless when you remove/replace the various components you physically damage the unit. (Make sure you remove the battery before you touch anything else).

Good luck.

 

thank you for your friendly and helpful reply. I have been trying to get answers on several pages but you are my first reply so thank you.

so if i download a copy of the same version of windows should my product key from the hp work to activate it? (i wasnt sure as you dont get disks now i am told-- been a while since I purchased a new machine.).

so even if i get i fairly small (say 60gb ssd) and leave the other 500gb standard disk in, would that still give me the snappiness if i stored all other data on larger drive?

sorry to repeat just want to be sure i have the idea right in my head

thanks again

andy

 

In general, yes. However I would not go for any SSD that is smaller than 128GB as you may still find yourself to run out of space.

 

I would not recommend an SSD smaller than 128GB (even those seem too small, with not enough performance (compared to fully channel populated larger models) and simply not enough capacity to set it up properly so that you can set it up (once) and forget about it.

Today (imo), an 'optimum SSD' has:
All the controllers channels populated with nand chips, has each nand controller channel optimally interleaved (think RAID0 for the nand/SSD at the nand chip level), has a controller architecture that doesn't use DRAM (yeah; RAM chip(s) that loses data when power is cut off) to handle the data it is trying to store for us and (for my intensive usage...); has enough capacity that I can partition it to a much smaller capacity (I simply leave the rest of it as 'unallocated') so that the sustained performance stays as high as possible over time, while the WA (write amplification) stays as low as possible (for longetivity/reliability).

Another characteristic that this 'optimum' SSD needs is that the Firmware/Design of the controller's logic is set up for doing GC (Garbage Collection) during/while the SSD is in use, instead of expecting/designed to do GC while the system is idle (my systems are normally used near 'red-line' and when they're finished they're normally shut down, so in essence, no GC and/or TRIM would happen with the 'wrong' SSD for my use).

The only SSD that I know and use (and would recommend) with these important characteristics is the Intel 510 Series 250GB SSD.

Even with all this said above: I would still recommend with a two drive bay setup as you have to move the Users folder (while doing a clean install of Windows 7) to the mechanical drive.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...rades/608752-hdd-partitioning-help-500gb.html


See the above thread starting with my post #3 on how to move the Users folder to the mechanical HDD.

The above method (along with using less than the full capacity of the SSD) will give you a system that (along with an SSD with similar characteristics as the Intel 510 250GB SSD) will give you a system that should be able to handle any workstation (and even some server type) workload you can throw at it (for a reasonably long time - 3-5 yrs).

Hope this helps.