Flash Drive v. Hard Drive For New Laptop
 

I have been looking at new laptop specifications and came across the Sony F series which is touted as a "workstation."

Here are the choices for drives:

What's the value in the "solid state drive?" Will boot-up be faster? Is a crash unlikely? Is stored data safer from accidental loss? Other qualities?

The capacity of 256 GB seems rather small although adequate for me . I'm wondering if this will be upgradeable in the future without voiding the warranty.

Your thoughts and suggestions will be appreciated.

The biggest benefit is speed. The SSD is much faster than an mechanical drive. Battery life, heat, and noise should also be better w/ the SSD.

Thanks. By "speed" does this mean that when the computer is completely powered off (i.e. no Standby or Hibernate) the time it takes to load Windows and start up a program is significantly reduced?

Everything is significantly faster.

Hard drives are prone to damage from dropping or hitting the computer. SSDs are not.

I have a Dell Adamo with an anemic 1.4 Ghz chip. With the SSD, it is speedy.

I am awed by the boot up and program launch speed of the Dell laptop I ordered with SSD.....One thing to note if you are much of a geek is that the price of the SSD drives is dropping pretty quickly. You can now get a 120 gig SSD for $200 or less. You could order your laptop with the smallest hard drive and then clone it onto an SSD.

Yes, but I looked at Frys and found that the price of a 256 GB SSD was not significantly cheaper than what Sony was charging factory-installed.

+1

An extra $650 is a rip-off. Buy the cheapest HDD and then swap it out with your own SSD.

Please take a look here at Frys.

256 GB SSD Drive prices: $470-700.

Plus, what happens to the warranty?

I wonder what brand of SSD is in the Sony? Do Seagate, Western Digital, and the other well-known companies make laptop SSDs?

I do not think $650 is a rip-off considering the fact that you will not have to deal with the hassle of actually rebuilding the drive yourself. Of course if you did order with the cheaper drive, buy a SSD then clone it yourself you would have the old drive to use as a backup drive or utility drive.

I have been watching the price of SSD's and they arent coming down fast enough for me to bite and $500 is just too much for me to pull the trigger but if you are getting a new machine and the extra dollars do not bother you...I would go that direction. This is where the technology is going because of speed, power consumption and reliability.

As far as who makes them. WD, Seagate do make them but I am seeing more from Crucial, OCZ and Kingston. I would assume because they are better suited to manufacture but dont know why for sure.

The 128GB ssd's run only $250-350. I've put in cheap ssd's on a beater think pad and my wife's rev a MacBook Air, and the speed improvement is noticeable. What is important for you, hard drive space or speed?

Unless things have significantly changed, the last time I checked SSDs do not save on battery life when compared to a regular hard drive.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...tery,1955.html

That's a tough question. For now, I'll go with speed since I could live with 256 GB.

How soon will there be larger capacity SSDs, say 500 or 1TB?

Does anyone know if there are warranty issues if you change the drive yourself on a laptop?

Is the benefit of speed (faster boot up etc) really worth the premium?
Unless you are doing some data transfer-intensive work normal hard disks should be perfectly all right.

I was OK with a 120GB drive for my laptop....I use it for work, so I don't have lots of media files--with years of emails, word files and powerpoints, I only have 50GB of files. If you need a bigger drive, you may find hard drives more cost effective/worthwhile.

Good question. I think speed is definitely one question but also how much is the security of knowing you are less likely to have a hard drive failure when traveling? That is big for me as well.

512GB SSDs already exist, but cost about $1,000. Until these get down to the $250 range, I won't be going in the SSD direction.

True, with no moving parts a SSD is not going to physically crash like traditional hard disk drives. Depending on the OP's line of work that would be a plus factor, but for me in particular, this is something that I'm not particularly worried about.

I've been lugging around the same corporate laptop for over 5 years now and it still hasn't crashed on me. Just in case though, I have backups of my data, and if I'm on a trip where there's some critical data that I might need (presentations, reports etc), I bring these data along on a flash drive and also on paper if there's a chance I won't be able to access a PC. In principle the flash drive is the same but it is still much cheaper than the SSD option.

Having backups and bringing along extras may sound inconvenient, but I think this is just part of having good information systems management. Even if you use an SSD you need to have a backup somewhere.


* Using the same laptop for 5 years means there might be a greater chance of it crashing sometime in the future - yay, good excuse to get a new laptop! :D

I just put a SSD into my four year old Thinkpad. It's like a new computer. If it's powered off and I tap the power button, I get the Windows login screen within about 15 seconds. I can fully use the computer (no hard drive loading things into memory and slowing things down) about two seconds after logging in.

gfunkdave, good to know you kept backups! ;)

Fry's isn't exactly the best for deals. Most laptops still carry a warranty after user-serviceable upgrades.

Considering I can buy a 240GB SSD drive for $400 here, I would call an extra $250 is a rip-off.

That's the key benefit for me, hard drives don't like moving yet a laptop by it's nature isn't static. Even with all the snazzy shock technology that new laptops have hard drive failure is more common in laptops than desktops. SSD's take that issue away and you get a nice speed advantage to boot.

There is a middle-ground if you want some of the performance of SSD, but the price of a normal hard disk, which are the "Hybrid" drives like this one.

At around $100 for 500GB it's only a little more than a normal platter drive, but it also has a 4GB of Flash/SSD which apparently can give a significant performance increase depending on what you're using the drive for.

There might be issues.

What most people do is save the drive you take out of the laptop and put it back in if/when you need a warranty repair.

-David

SSD can fail as well - this has happened to me on an OEM Dell. The problem is that it is much more difficult and expensive to recover the data on a SSD rather than a HD.

Agreed that a SSD can fail as well but why was it so much more expensive and difficult to recover?

As others have already pointed out, there is no doubt of the performance superiority of the SSD over traditional hard drives (an acquaintance likes to call 'em "spinning rust" :) Everything will simply be much faster with the SSD ... at least when it is new.

It is important to realize that SSD quality varies greatly amongst brands. The premium brands (e.g. OCZ, Intel) will consistently perform well on all performance metrics and for a long time to come, especially true for the prevalent MLC SSD drives. The lesser brands will likely perform only half as well (but probably still better than most laptop hard drives) and lack the "secret sauces" in their controllers to ensure adequate write performance (a real Flash memory weak point) as more of the drive is used/reused. I have personally experienced cheaper SSDs pausing/freezing annoyingly on disk IO. You must do your research (Anandtech is an excellent source) and understand that you get what you pay for ... there are good reasons why OCZ and Intel SSD cost 50% more than cheap brands.

An important consideration is the drive form factor ... e.g. my Thinkpad X300 only supports 1.8" SSD with microSATA interface. This means there are only two brands (OCZ and latest generation Kingston with the Toshiba controller) worth considering, stay away from the Photofast. Not surprisingly, they command high prices ($700+ CAD for 240-256GB). If your laptop supports 2.5" SSD, you will have at least half a dozen options at significantly lower price points.

If you are not technically inclined and/or can't be bothered to do the research required to find a good product you will be happy with, my recommendation is to pay the premium and get the SSD option available through the laptop manufacturer. They have applied the rigorous due-diligence and testing to ensure satisfactory performance, reliability, and compatibility. One-throat-to-choke for warranty is good as well.

SSDs do fail, but generally at a much lower rate than hard drives. Btw, there is no reason why SSD would be harder to recover from; I suppose the poster meant it would be harder to find a data recovery service that knows how to recover data from a broken SSD. As with all newer technology, it takes the market a while to catch up to the needs, especially true for a niche market. The best thing to do is to make sure you perform consistent backup of your data. Fyi, I have found Casper to be an excellent and cost effective tool for creating a bootable clone of a drive and I setup an Outlook task reminder to run it once a month. Combine that with a set-it-n-forget-it online backup service (e.g. Backblaze or Crashplan), and you are golden!

I will never purchase another computer, dektop or laptop, that does not have an SSD as the OS drive. It is a huge improvement in useability. That being said I won't be ripped off either. So in your example I'd buy my own SSD and install it myself. It's not hard with tons of how to's on Google.

What hassle? Most Windows machines come out of the box with manufacturer-provided crapware; I've not worked with Sony in while, but in the past, they've been more guilty than most of that. Reinstalling a clean copy of Windows is, for many of us, the first step to using a new machine regardless of whether we're using the original disks.

I'm still most comfortable with Intel; they're no longer the price-performance leader, but the X25M has a GREAT track record and it's still pretty competitive in speed and price for the new-ish 120GB one@$250 (the $400 price of the 160gb, not so competitive.)


Little or none of the durability benefit, though. I'd personally take an SSD even if it were slower to get that, but then again, I'm very hard on my equipment - back before SSDs I was killing at least one mechanical drive a year between 2002-2008.

Yup. Of course, this is easier on some models than on others.

A decent price point for high-quality 80-160GB SSDs right now is about $1.50/GB (compared to $0.08/GB for traditional 500GB-1TB hard drives).

In fact, Newegg has a good 120GB SSD for $170 after rebate.

Boy, you can say that again. I've changed out hard drives in Dells and Lenovos for years and am used to removing a screw, sliding out a tray, changing the drive. Recently a friend asked me to help him change out his laptop hard drive and I said, "No problem." He brought over a Sony. After much looking at the laptop and online, I finally found instructions that involved removing the screen, the keyboard, darn near disassembling the entire box before you could remove the hard drive. Never again.

Considering the OP is talking about a Sony, I'd look at what's involved in swapping. $650 is only marginally above market for a 256 GB SSD, and may be WELL WORTH THE PRICE to have it installed.

+1 ^

Ouch. That sounds like the process of replacing memory in my netbook -- which is under the motherboard, but there's no door, so it requires disassembling EVERYTHING. Oddly enough, upgrading the hard drive is pretty easy: three screws for the keyboard, pop the keyboard up, and the HD is right there. :)

...sounds like a very good idea. Alternatively, get a techie friend to look up the service manual for him, if he's not comfortable with the idea himself.

The only problem with it is that at current costs and my upgrade rate, I'd expect a 160gb+ SSD to last through more than one machine.

Depends on the drive. Not all SSDs are equal--check the performance ratings. Make sure both the drive and the OS support the TRIM command or you'll find your machine slowing down over time. (I know XP doesn't support TRIM, 7 does, I don't know about Vista, I have no idea on Macs.)

I use a 500gb hard drive that I bought a couple of years ago for $80. There is no way on earth I can justify paying 10X that much (or more) for a SSD.

Performance *might* be faster on SSD, but it really depends on what you're doing. There are a lot of bottlenecks that can cause performance issues, and the hard drive might be one of a very small factor.

For most budget minded / value minded folks, SSDs are still not practical or realistic.

My laptop with a 500gb 5400rpm (not even 7200rpm) hard drive, performance is good enough for what I do most of the day - office documents, web browsing, youtube, etc etc.

For data reliability, I use the savings from buying a SSD to set up my own NAS, and back up my data regularly to prevent any worries about losing data. Heck for the amount of money you save, you can buy an extra laptop!!

From the Sony website (can't find a way to directly link to this paragraph):

What does "TRIM" do?

Do you happen to remember which model it was? Is this supposedly true of all Sony laptops?

I don't remember the exact model. It was a VAIO A-series, I think. I looked for the YouTube video that had guided me, couldn't find the exact one. Looks like most Sonys require removal of all the bottom screws, then remove the keyboard, then take the HD out from the top of the opened laptop.

Speed is a great advantage, if you need it.

Disadvantages are price and limited write cycles. How limited, I do not know yet. But on average, an USB flash drive will last about two years until you start to have problems.

For a desktop, I recommend Solid state for operating system and programs and traditional hard drives for data storage.

For laptop, toss up. But remember, had a solid backup plan. For $50 a year, carbonite rocks!

^ The only laptop I purchase now is a (refurbished) Lenovo for that exact reason. Easy to replace the hard drive.

Vista does not.

Most SSD manufacturers have userspace tools you can run that support TRIM on XP and Vista.

Also, some manufacturers have built things into the drive firmware to improve performance with XP/Vista without those tools. Reports vary on how effective they are.

Linux supports TRIM only on newer kernels and filesystems (notably ext4.)

Do you really need that much space in your laptop? If so, SSD is not for you, but on the other hand, most people don't by a long shot.

An 80gb SSD from some manufacturers is less than twice that much money; the benchmark Intel model (no longer the best, by any means) is about $170.

Good deal. Do they charge extra for the privilege?


I've had production systems with pre-TRIM Intel drives running 24/7 for more than two years now. An average SSD will last a great deal longer than two years, unless you are running an incredibly write-heavy workload.

Under an incredibly write-heavy workload -- for example, what are in essence supercomputing applications -- I've heard stories of SSDs failing a lot faster than that: if you are writing terabytes of new data to disk every day, SSDs are either (A) not for you, or (B) a consumable. Most people write no more than a few gigabytes of new data per day.)

For most users, I don't see the value proposition of SSDs for desktops; durability is not an issue, and striped RAID is cheaper, and practical where it is impractical in a laptop. You can get a 4-drive RAID 0 or RAID10 (4-way striped or mirrored + striped 2-way each) for the cost of a single SSD.

Where the random-access performance of SSDs is valuable enough on a desktop (certain sorts of applications, including software development - our developer desktops now come with an SSD) you typically need to include those applications' data (eg your source code and your IDE caches) on the SSD as well as just the applications and OS.