Has anyone tried upgrading the dv6 with an SSD?

Once my dv6 arrives, I'm thinking of upgrading it with an SSD. I want to keep the BlueRay so if I decide to do this, I'll get a 256GB SSD and replace the hard drive. Has anyone done this? I would guess that the easiest way to do it is to make back-up disks, then replace the hard drive and reinstall everything from those disks. Does that make sense? Is it an easy thing to do?

P.S. The search function on these forums really needs some work...

 

Yup, exactly that.

 

Yep works great. I installed a Vertex 2 as soon as I got mine. A SSD is seriously the best single hardware investment you can make for you laptop. It's gonna fly!

I have a retail copy of Windows so I started from scratch but you will have to use recovery disks.

 

Thanks. The SSD I was considering (slow, but $200 for 256GB) sold out too quickly for me to buy it. I'm sure there will be another one on sale soon enough -- the base price on Newegg is almost within my reach as it is.

 

How much are you looking to spend?
The Crucial m4 seems like the best bang for the buck atm.
That or Intel 510 for reliability or Vertex 3 for speed.

 

I'm thinking about $300. I could get the M4 for the $420, but I think I'll wait for Intel's Cherryville drives which should hopefully drive prices down further. Speed is relative: I will be upgrading from a 250GB 5400RPM hard drive to one that is 640GB at 7200RPM and has a fresh OS to boot. I'm hoping it will feel faster even as it is for half a year and then I'll hunt down a 250GB SSD during the Black Friday/Christmas sales. It's just that the $200 for 250GB was too good a deal to pass up (too bad that a lot of people thought so too...).

 

I got the Crucial C300 for my dv6t. Works great. WEI for my hard disk performance is 7.9.

If you know how to use a screw driver and know how to install Windows, then you're already all set. Just remember to not defrag an SSD.

 

I'm "new" to the whole SSD thing, so please forgive my ignorance when I ask, why?

 

Solid State Drives can access any location in the same time. A defrag actually causes more (unnecessary) write processes.

SSDs do not need to be defragmented.

 

Because for an SSD, it doesn't matter where the data is located. A hard drive is a disk with a head that physically moves around and reads it (sort of like one of those really old record players, but thousands of times faster). Thus, if data used for a single task is all over the place, it takes more time to accomplish the task because the head has to move around to access it. An SSD has no moving parts so the location of the data doesn't matter.

Furthermore, you don't want to be moving data around on the SSD because the number of writes each cell can sustain is finite. Don't worry though, I think Windows 7 is smart enough not to defragment SSDs.