Landing Gear

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.

BigMoneyGrip

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.

Landing Gear

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?

Always Flyin

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.

mikel51

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.

Landing Gear

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.

Braindrain

+1

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

Landing Gear

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?

mcgahat

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.

frankmu

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?

Astrophsx

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

Landing Gear

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?

KIXman

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.

mikel51

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.

mcgahat

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.