Boosting laptop with SSD?

[yamahacrasher]

Hi,

Could my "old" laptop benefit from a SS drive? I heard that older laptops cant get higher speed with SSD installed.

I plan to get a small 40Gb, and use comp just simple tasks like surfing, skype, some picture editing maybe.

The specs of the comp is:

Acer Aspire 4920G-6A1G25Mn Product Specification

Mfr No (AKX0X026)

Processor Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T5750

Processor Detail 2 MB L2Cache, 667MHz FSB

Processor Speed 2000

Amt RAM (MB) 1024

Max RAM (MB) 4096

Type RAM DDR2 667 MHz SDRAM

Chipset Northbridge Intel® PM965 Express chipset

Hard Disk (GB) 250

CDROM Type DVD Super Multi double layer

Graphic Chip ATI

Graphic Chip Detail Radeon™ HD2400 XT

Amt Video RAM (MB) up to 383 MB

LCD Techology WXGA Acer CrystalBrite TFT

Natural Resolution 1280 x 800 ¾Ô¡à«Å

Number of USB Ports 4 x USB 2.0

Card Reader Support 5-in-1

Expansion Device Available S-Video out

Number Of IEEE 1394 Ports 1 ªèç

Number Of Pc Card Slots 1 PCMCIA 2.1

Sound Hardware Yes

Built-in Microphone Yes

Built-in Speaker Dolby® Home Theater

Modem Include 56K Fax/Modem

Network Include 10/100/1000Mbps

Bluetooth Support Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR

Wireless LAN Support Yes

Type Wireless LAN Intel® Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN

Built-in Camera Acer CrystalEye Webcam

Camera Type 1.3 Mega-Pixel

Weight (include batteries) 2.62 kg

Operating System Windows® Vista® Home Premium

Other Acer SignalUp InviLink Nplify wireless technology with 5X Speed Up

Thanks for ideas!

[admin]

I'm not a HD expert by any means but I think the main benefit of an SS drive is speed, no? I'm not sure that the kinds of uses you describe benefit too greatly from a faster HD. Web surfing? Probably no great increase in performance. Skype, no. Maybe picture editing but probably more on the open and write times rather than the actual photo manipulation.

[Teddy]

What are SSDs?

A solid state drive (SSD) is a device used for storing data permanently. Unlike traditional hard drives, it has no moving parts. It works in a similar way to a USB memory stick, or a memory card in a digital camera, but is specifically designed to work as a standalone hard drive.

What are the benefits of SSDs?

Faster access. A traditional hard drive needs to be spinning at a certain speed to work. This takes some time from a ‘standing start’. It also needs the head (the device used to write and read information) to move to the exact physical location on the disk where the relevant data is stored. An SSD doesn’t have either of these requirements and thus works much more quickly – even though the difference is a fraction of a second each time, it soon mounts up.

More resilient. Because an SSD has no moving parts, it’s much sturdier and can cope with wider extremes in temperature or knocks and bumps.

Quieter. Aside from cooling fans in the notebook or PC, an SSD is completely silent. This is different to traditional hard drives where you can often hear the drive working (particularly when it is on the verge of failing).

Fewer fragmentation problems. Unlike traditional hard drives which often suffer from defragmentation (where files are physically scattered across the disk, making them slower to access), it makes little difference where files are located on an SSD.

Size. Existing SSDs are sometimes smaller and lighter than the equivalent hard drives, though at the moment this advantage disappears with higher-capacity drives.

What are the drawbacks of SSDs?

Capacity. The largest SSD available this year will be 128GB, with both Samsung and SanDisk working on 256GB editions. While this is enough for many people who use a laptop for its portability, it’s not as much as traditional hard drives which come in sizes up to 1TB (1000GB).

Price. At the moment SSDs are considerably more expensive per GB than traditional drives. (However, prices are dropping rapidly and this is expected to continue.)

Windows problems. The various editions of Windows, including Vista, are not designed with SSDs in mind. The problem is that an SSD is split into fewer, but bigger, sections than a traditional drive. However, Windows is set up so that it can only handle a small ‘chunk’ of data at a time, which means an SSD doesn’t run as efficiently as possible.

What is the future for SSDs?

The specific advantages of SSDs mean they are most suited to use in laptops. At the moment only a few high-end laptops use SSDs, mainly because of the costs. Most analysts believe that the technology will advance to the point that SSDs become a practical and affordable alternative in 2010.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has had talks with Samsung about changing Windows so it can make best use of SSDs. While Samsung hopes this change can come in an update to Vista, it’s more likely that any changes will come in Windows 7 – which coincidentally is due out in 2010.

http://www.brighthub.com/computing/hardware/articles/9104.aspx

I think adding a SSD to an old laptop would bring minimal difference to the overall performance. Besides 40GB would soon get eaten up. But I guess reading around and drawing your conclusions would be the best thing to do.

[yamahacrasher]

Well 40 gb is only 3k, I want to see the crazy startup time. I'll do a clip of "320Gb HD startup" vs. "40 Gb SSD startup".

Will be next week, I'm in Korea now.

[beej]

I've been told that drive speeds vary greatly, and if you're going to get one, this is the brand/model to look into.

I'll be picking one up for my mackbook soon enough.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300466373488&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

[funky_house]

I have a 256GB SSD in my MBA and it boots pretty fast, and Apps open quickly also.

I don't know if an SSD would make much difference for Skype and surfing. More RAM and better processor might be better.

There are downsides to SSDs, expense being one of them.

[Crustyjuggler]

I changed mine to SSD and it was the best upgrade i ever made. The older stuff is cheaper and still leaves regular hard drives feeling dated.

I find it faster all round, like a new machine.. (for the skeptics)