Originally Posted by
Landing Gear
OP said his laptop came with an HDD and he wants to change to an SSD. Does this mean that he will have to adjust some settings on the laptop? If so, which one?
If Windows 7, it SHOULD be automatic, but it can't hurt to verify them manually. Actually, since he got a Samsung, downloading the "Samsung SSD Magician" (there may be a CD copy in the box he can use, but a retail CD is probably out of date) and running the OS optimization, it will do three of the major ones for you:
- disable SuperFetch
- disable ReadyBoost
- make sure Defrag isn't running
It also suggests disabling the Indexing service, which I can't recommend. Intel has a slightly different set of recommendations, and their SSD toolbox app will check them.
It's also important to make sure the system's SATA controller is in "AHCI" (or "RAID" or "IRRT") mode, rather than "Legacy" (sometimes labeled ATA or IDE.) Switching this is non-trivial, but it's generally necessary to get Trim working.
Could you explain this a bit? I don't know what Sandforce is.
Sandforce is one of the manufacturers makes the controller chips that run inside of SSDs made by other companies (they're owned by LSI, now, but still have their own branding.)
Marvell and LAMD (Link-A-Media) are the two other major manufacturers who sell controllers.
Intel uses a mix of their own controllers (just on enterprise drives these days) and Sandforce.
Samsung makes and uses their own controllers. I don't think they've ever sold controllers separately, but they've been known to sell whole drives to other companies to resell under their own brands.
OCZ owns Indilynx and uses a mix of their own Indilynx controllers, Marvell controllers (often with a misleading Indilynx label) and Sandforce controllers.
What do you think of a) the new Seagate-branded SSDs;
The reviews are very good, but they're very new. They use a relatively mature controller from LAMD, and we've had good luck with the Corsair Neutron which uses the same controller, but the deployment of those I have is TINY (10, all in the same server) compared to some of the other drive models and controllers.
and b) the Toshiba OEM SSDs?
Which ones?
We've had some pretty good luck with some much older Toshibas -- 1.8" drives for the T400s and T410s were hard to find except for the really slow older Intels -- but I've got no idea whose controller they are. They've been reliable, but we didn't got to "SSDs for everyone" in that generation or even with the T420s so the number we deployed compared to newer drives is relatively small.
On a quick google, it looks like at least some of their newer drives use their own controller. I can't find a review on Anandtech which generally has the most comprehensive reviews of non-enterprise SSDs, but there are some relatively positive reviews on more minor sites.
--
Honestly, unless people have a very specific workload, performance differences between the slowest current-generation SSDs (the Intel 330, OCZ Agility 3 on async flash) and the fastest (OCZ Vector and Vertex 4, Samsung 840, plus various Toggle flash Sandforce drives) will not be noticeable to most people. I'd buy on a balance of price/reliability, entirely ignoring performance.
If you have very specific workloads, knowing which controller is best for your workload is more important than the raw performance numbers, although I'd stick to sync or toggle NAND rather than async if write speed is a potential issue... the cost differences are generally quite small.