What SSD would you put in a Vaio Z540 ?

How much battery power can you save with a good SSD for a Z540 ?

Some examples ?

 

The title of your thread is called what SSD would you put in a Z54?
I would use a SSD with a Samsung controller because they are very energy efficient SSD drives that consume low amounts of power.

This thread here has a lot of helpful info about SSD drives.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5051863#post5051863

Btw, i put an SSD drive in my SZ and i opted for a P128 Corsair drive. This drive uses the Samsung controller as do the OCZ Summit SSD drives.This report here I found very helpful when i was looking to buy an SSD drive.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/16848/13

As for battery life not everyone agrees how much advantage a low power SSD drive has over a mechanical drive battery life wise. I have noticed some improvements battery life wise but I wouldn't like to put an actual figure on it.

 

I would suggest you wait until the 32nm Intel SSDs come out. Then if you have money, buy X25-E 128G, or if you look for price efficiency buy X25-M 80G.

 

I can highly recommend the X25-M 80GB - I had such installed in my Z540.
It appears to be overall faster/more energy efficient than the Samsung drives. (from the reviews i have read).
The daily performance for the Z with a SSD is a very good experience (and we are talking vista here - will be even better under win 7).

 

INTEL x25-M, NONE OTHER! The I/O's on these SSDs own. As a boot/OS drive they kick all other SSDs arses in terms of giving you a snappy Windows experience. Trust me, I've had other SSDs as boot drives and they sucked big-time compared with my Intel!

 

With my Corsair P128 drive my boot up times are fast. This is with Vista Ultimate and with only doing a semi-clean install. I have actually put a timer to it.

Access times are 0.2 on average. I think the Intel drives score a bit higher in this area?

Power consumptions and balanced performance was the most important thing that concerned me when i was looking for a drive.
I would be interested to read those reports that put the Intel drives over the new generation Sata II drives that use the Samsung controller when it comes to power consumption.

The P128 has random reads of 200MB and writes of 220MB. Things don't stand still.

 

Sexy, please check this line. You must mean sequential reads. Use CrystalDiskMark (free HDD benchmarking software) to establish the correct numbers. Random reads/writes are VITALLY important for using an SSD as a boot/OS drive. Intel X25-M random reads/writes (4K blocks) are 20/50 MB/s. SSDs with JMicron controllers fail dismally - do not purchase! See a great review of the SSD scene at: http://anandtech.com/storage/

 

Here is the Intel X-25M The newer SSDs (like yours) have better sequential write speeds, but I'd go for better random writes (very important for a boot/OS drive) over sequential write speed any day!

 

Thanks for posting that Dingle.

I've had a look at the Anandtech reviews and some do show how fast the Intel drives are no doubt. However, a lot of those articles are not really current. Tomshardware also does not give the info that i need anyway about power consumption and comparing these drives.

 

OCZ Vertex Series or Intel X25-E (64GB)
these are best perform SSD's

 

The Vertex is only good if you are comfortable with constantly tweaking the drive (and you have a very good backup strategy in place) - via frequent firmware upgrades and running beta utilities to keep the drive performing at top speed - NOT if you just want to put the SSD in and forget about it. For that, the Samsung-based or Intel SSDs are best.

Also note that with most SSDs, you have to consider how the drive performs once you've been using it for a while - SSD performance degrades over time (and a lot quicker than you may expect it to). Firmware updates are upcoming to address this issue (which is also going to be addressed in Windows 7). I've been doing A LOT of research the past few days as I am about to pull the trigger on a Z7xx and put an SSD in it. My research has revealed that if you want something which will run Windows and your applications very, very quickly, you cannot beat the Intel X25-M (even though its write speed is less than half that of the OCZs). If you manipulate a lot of large files (create large files, write/move/copy large files, etc.), the OCZs may be better for you.

See this article, which compares the OCZ Vertex, the Intel X25-M and the OCZ Summit (Samsung PB22-J based SSD): http://techreport.com/articles.x/17136

To complicate matters further, as sniper_sung mentioned, Intel is supposedly releasing new SSDs soon. I really wish they would just go ahead and release this information already so I can decide whether I should wait or pull the trigger...

Regarding power consumption, it seems that the Samsung generation 2 based SSDs (PB22-J) are the ones to beat: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-flash-ssd-charts/Power-Requirement-at-Idle,921.html AND http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...Power-Requirement-at-Max.-Throughput,922.html

 

I was curious and did your tests on my desktop, and I got significantly lower results




should I be worried about harddrive failures in the future?

EDIT: added HDTUNE

 

Edited to add:
I see that you edited a 2nd hdtune and you own a mechanical drive. SSD drives are faster. Your results actually look normal to me for a mechanical drive.

 

Hey Rachel

First of all, those are incredibly quick boot times... Congrats Second, you need to clean your screen

How old (or new) is your P128? Have you filled it up to capacity?

It's important to note the following line in the Tech Report: "Because the block-rewrite penalty can severely impact SSD performance, we've elected to test the drives in a simulated used state, with all their flash pages occupied" ( http://techreport.com/articles.x/17136/2)

This should explain (for the most part) why their results are slower than you would expect (or in this case, slower than you actually see in "real world").

It would be interesting to see what firmware version you are running.

Lastly, do you let your computer idle a lot? (For example, leave it on for long periods without using it, such as overnight) The Samsung controller apparently uses idle time to "refresh" itself (I think the technical term is garbage collection) so that you do not run into the "used state" the Tech Report is talking about.

 

viol8r thanks for explaining.

I bought my HD in June and i have about 90GB left. I'm not sure how i would check the firmware?

 

Install SpeedFan, and try the S.M.A.R.T. tab.

 

^
Thanks, but that does not work. All i get is the CPU speed and that's it. I'm sure the main SSD thread in the hardware forum would know more because i haven't updated the firmware and there may just be one version right now anyway.

This report is very interesting, especially the boot up times.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/06/05/corsair-p256-256gb-ssd-review/9

 

Hmm, that's really weird. So you don't see your hard drive listed in the drop down in the S.M.A.R.T. tab in SpeedFan? The only time I've had an issue with SpeedFan not picking up a hard drive is if I am running RAID.

Another way to check your firmware would be to go to Device Manager - Right click your hard drive - Properties - Details tab - Choose Hardware Ids from the Property drop down, and then in the window below you will see something like this (using mine as an example):

IDE\DiskSAMSUNG_MCCOE64G5MPP-0VA________________PS105006

The "PS105006" is the firmware version.

 

viol8r it is VBM1801Q.

 

Cool. Hopefully, Samsung will provide Corsair/OCZ a way to let end users upgrade their firmware.

From http://techreport.com/articles.x/17136/3:

 

After i found out what my firmware version my HD was using i googled the ID.
There was a firmware version before the one i have now and it was VBM15D1Q.

Offering future firmware updates is of course a good thing but i doubt that i'll be upgrading mine as i don't have any problems with my drive.

 

That's a good strategy. You may want to reconsider once Windows 7 is out (assuming you will be using it) to get TRIM support on your SSD to keep it performing at 100%.