Little Difference with SSD?
 

I replaced the hard drive in my HP Pavilion dm1z with a 128 GB SSD, but the performance impact is pretty small. When I replaced the drive in my 6 year old ThinkPad last year, it was like I had a new computer.

What do I need to do to get the performance? I'm specifically thinking of boot time (which isn't bad...but it wasn't bad before either). I have enabled TRIM and disabled defragmentation on schedule.

Anyone have ideas?

Thanks!

I have some notes on this that are two lengthy to post. If you want them PM me with an email address.

Post them; other people will benefit and you won't have to play secretary.

Which SSD did you buy? Some low-end super-cheap model? Performance improvement can potentially be great, but some of the cheapest SSDs can be really slow, like the ones they used to supply with first netbooks.

It's an OCZ Vertex...not one of the best I know, but the last one I had wasn't anything special either.

This will work better I bet. This is the source for most of the the notes I use.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/windo...-are-they/2902

Note that it is in three parts.

Thanks. My hard drive score in the Windows Experience Index is 7.2, and TRIM and NCQ are active according to CrystalDiskInfo. Apparently the 7200 RPM drive that came with the computer was pretty good, anyway.

My score was 5.6 if I recall correctly until I went through all of this. It brought it up to 7.5.

I would still think that an SSD would do better than a 7200rpm.

I upgraded an old Toshiba with double the ram and went from a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm and it was a dramatic increase in performance.

Sorry to hear you didn't get a better boost.

I was thinking of getting one of those "hybrid" drives a year ago, but they didn't have great reviews.

You should feel a significant improvement then...

Make sure to go through this step, from the guide posted by Paint Horse:

Part of it depends on what you are doing with the machine. The more heavy disk intensive it is, the better the speed increase would be. If you don't have lots of disk access, it won't be as much of a difference.

Not exactly true. Of course, if the disk is not used at all, there will be no difference in speed. However the benefit of near-0 random access time, means you should see the difference in pretty much any disk operations.

I will rephrase.

If you are rendering videos with constant disk access, you will see a greater performance boost than if you are reading twitter all day.

Actually the biggest boost would be at operations like searching files, loading apps, etc. Constant read/write of single files will give be only couple times faster. Operations involving multiple seeks will see the greatest boost - tens/hundreds times faster.

I put an SSD in my DM1Z as well - but the difference was incredible. Booting went from 50 seconds to 15, opening Office apps went from 30 seconds to 3.

Sounds like something isn't right.