pooker

Is it worth the money to buy a solid state drive and upgrade my laptop with it? As a traveler I often worry that my hard-drive will kill out. Also, as someone who uses my laptop a-lot for work and personal use, I find that I would like to increase the speed and durability of it. From my understanding a Solid state drive does this

1. Increases write and access speed because there are no moving parts
2. Is more durable. Dropping a laptop can mean damaging the hard drive because of all the moving parts, but this is not an issue with SSD

My question would be, is it worth spending the money to upgrade? I am not too tech savy, so if the gains from this are minimal I do not think it would be worth the 4-500 to upgrade. Also, what brands do you recommend? I would like some good input about the worthiness of this purchase. Thanks

piper28

To me, the biggest question comes down to can you live with the smaller size that the ssd drive will likely be? And also, if your laptop is too old, I probably wouldn't do it either. But other than that, then I'd tend to say yes, it's worth it. I deal with a lot of machines daily, and there's no question that an ssd drive makes a noticeable difference in the computer. And prices have gotten relatively reasonable these days, you can often get a 240G one for less than $200. The next step up in size (512G) still tends to be a pretty healthy increase in price.

I tend to be a little conservative myself in picking ssd drives, and don't necessarily go for the ones that are the absolute fastest, because I find these drives also tend to have more reports of issues. Samsung, Intel, Plextor, these are all drives that aren't quite as cutting edge as, say, OCZ, but I'll take the slightly slower speed for a somewhat more proven track record. (But keep in mind, as with any hard drive, everyone is going to have their own opinion on the "best" brands to buy, and be insistent that theirs is the correct one. The reality is all brands can have their issues, and for the most part, they're all pretty decent, at least amongst the major manufacturers.) I'm not necessarily completely sold on the TLC gates being used on the latest Samsung 840 series, but their Pro series I think doesn't use those chips.

And yeah, and ssd is not going to have an issue with being dropped. However, the rest of the laptop is still just as prone to problems if you drop it . LCD's in particular aren't real happy with sudden deceleration.

Loren Pechtel

Last year I decided the SSD in my desktop was too small and I upgraded when I found a good deal. The old SSD was actually bigger than the drive in my laptop (the machine is a bit old) and so I stuck it in there.

Bad idea, the laptop was now so fast that it took off running. The last I saw it was when it went out of sight over the mountains.

pooker

Thanks for the responses guys, that was what I was looking for.

Would it be worth upgrading to a SSD for this laptop(the one I have), or is it too old? I bought it two years ago

http://jeengly.com/products.php?act=prod&pid=1046

I would love to speed it up, especially with some of the intensive programs I run. I run out of memory with my ram on certain programs, and I have learned that allocating more virtual memory on the hard drive helps. It looks like this might speed it up some as well.

Also, how is the fit? Are SSD the same size as regular HDD? Will it toss around in the laptop? I noticed that some of the sites have (conversion kits) which just looks like a cable.

msb0b

My opinion is to go SSD in every computer system. It makes that much difference. To quantify, the IOPS (number of accesses per second) of a mainstream SSD today is 20,000 to 60,000, vs 100 for a typical 7200rpm HDD. That means SSD can complete 200 disk accesses in the time for a HDD to complete one.

Your IdeaPad Y560P is certainly new enough to fully reap the benefit of a SSD. If you are running out of memory, consider upgrading the memory to 8GB, 12GB or 16GB at the same time. But first I want to ask, what application is running out of memory, and is it 32-bit or 64-bit? Even if your operating system is 64-bit to use more than 4GB RAM, a 32-bit windows application will be able to allocate only 2 or 4GB RAM before falling back on scratch disk (not swap, to differentiate from operating system.) If this is the case, check if a 64-bit upgrade for the application is available.

SSD are the same size as laptop HDD with 2.5 inch platters. They do come in two thicknesses, 9.5mm is the standard and 7.5mm is the newer slim form factor. A 7.5mm drive will fit in a 9.5mm bay with a shim but not the other way.

I agree with piper28's list of recommended manufacturers, but want to add more detail to it. Avoid OCZ because the company finances are shaky, asynchronous flash and tri-level cells (TLC). Presently, only Samsung 840 uses new TLC that are rated at 1000 erase cycles, vs 3000 cycles of typical MLC flash. Samsung 840 Pro and 830 are not TLC ergo safe. All other SSD either use SandForce or Marvell controllers, both are mature, but some people still avoid SandForce for their spotty track record.

Make sure SSD drive firmware is the latest version and keep it up to date to avoid problems.

pooker

Hi, thank you so much for the input. My laptop has 6gb and it is a 64bit on Windows 7. The program is Mathcad that is using so much memory.

msb0b

Looks like Mathcad is 32-bit only for now. It will be subject to the 2GB/4GB memory address limit even when running on a 64-bit operating system. When your calculation is running, how much does the Task Manager say Mathcad is using? You will need to open the Task Manager, go to Processes tab and find Mathcad.exe in the list.

cordelli

It will be faster. But even that is going to depend on what you use the laptop for. You will notice it if you are rendering videos hours long. you may not notice it if you use it for word processing and e-mails.

The question of reliability I don't believe has been proven yet. Yes, it may survive if you drop it better than a platter disk, but may not survive other things, and just because it has no moving parts doesn't mean it lasts forever. The MBTF (mean time between failures) for a solid state drive is 2 million hours, it's 1.5 million hours for a hard drive. That's 228 and 171 years, so I don't consider either to have a real advantage.

Part of the equation is also the cost., SSD's hold much less for the same money.

It's going to be different for everybody. On my last laptop purchase, the choices between a 128 SSD and a 500 GB hard drive were cost wise about the same. For me I felt close to four times the storage was worth the disadvantages of the regular platter drive.

I've never had a laptop disk fail. Not saying they don't fail, and not saying I don't have backups, just that of all the laptops that have come and gone over the years, every hard disk is still functioning should I need to go back to it.

Zarf4

Another advantage of the SSD is lower power consumption. Although I haven't quantified it, it feels like I'm getting a 20% longer run time on my battery with similar load. Yes there are a limited # of write cycles, especially with MLC and worse on the Samsung 840 (non-pro) TLC, but I don't think about it because as prices come down & capacity goes up I'll put the latest and greatest in my most used machine and migrate the older ones down.

I also run a home Linux server 24/7 and feel better with the lower temperature & energy usage albeit small.

gfunkdave

You'll notice a big difference in bootup speed and time it takes to open applications.

piper28

I'd say consider yourself very lucky on that one. Admittedly, I deal with a fair number of machines on a daily basis, but I see drive failures relatively often. I've seen some drives that are going strong 10+ years later. I've also had drives that failed in under a month. (I'm not saying ssd's are going to be any more reliable, although I think the no moving parts will help. Drive failures are just a normal part of life, and I don't see that going away anytime soon.) Even in my personal machines, I've had numerous drive failures over the years.

lensman

I say, if you're going to keep it for at least a year, it's worth upgrading.

There are a zillion review sites for SSDs nowadays, but Tom's Hardware has a really easy to understand table:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rk,3269-6.html

I'd also say that it's hard to go *wrong* with any of the SSDs in the table if you're upgrading from a HDD. I switched several years ago and all the drives listed are much faster than my SSD.

That said, I would try to avoid the ones with asynchronous NAND.

Loren Pechtel

The ones I've seen are an exact replacement of a normal 2.5" laptop SSD. (Yes, even in desktop machines. The one in this box is is in an adapter bracket in an adapter bracket so it mounts in a 5.25" bay.)

Laptops are much more of a pain to deal with than desktops but the electronics are the same.

nmenaker

Yeah, it is pretty much worth it if you are a solid personal or business user of a laptop.

If you open and close a lot of apps, or do some disk intensive tasks, video and photo editing or CAD software or anything at all that would use an HDD as a quasi RAM disk this will really help.

With my macbooks, I just open and close apps at will, since it takes literally 1 second or less to re-open them.

Startup and shutdown for macos, for VM's and Win7 or really win8 is just silly stupid quick, less than 5-10 seconds.

An SSD with anything more than a SATA2 I/O rate will just make everything very snappy.

If you can handle the reduced storage capacity (as others have said) and manage things like photos, music, videos (large libraries here) with a nice USB3.0 external storage solution then you're best off.

256GB SSDs can be had for .50$ a GB or less, 500GB+ drives are about 20% more at .60$ per GB.

At this point in SSD evolution, I would not say stay away from companies like OCZ. I have many of their drives and they all perform well and often with even lower pricing than competitors.

The Ferrari of SSD's are really the Intel drives, some of the Kingston, and then I would put the best performance for the money in the Samsungs, the 830 and 840 version, not the pros but just the regular all have very good ratings and pricing.

Tip: make sure to do your homework on your hardware platform and the OS that you are going to use. Putting in an SSD isn't just as simple as install, copy/restore and go. There are a couple pretty relevant settings that need to be turned on or off in order to optimize both performance and reduce unnecessary wear on the SSD. This is all pretty well reported on in the markets, a quick search of either the notebooks.com or macrumors.com forums will point you in the right direction.

A quick search shows that the Ideapad 560P only has SATA 2, with is 3.0GB speed max, this is 2nd gen not SATA3 6.0GB which is 3rd gen.

So, you could save a little $$ and focus on SATA2 SSD's or just get a SATA3 (for a future machine upgrade maybe) and just know that you'll only be getting 250MB/s throughput and not as high as 450-500mbs which SATA3 would offer.

http://www.lenovo.com/shop/americas/...ad%20Y560p.pdf

andylogan

This is currently an XP Pro "server" only in the sense that five other computers access the data on it (currently data on a separate HDD from the OS). Computer is running 24/7.

On the next build I'm pretty much doing SSD for OS but wondering about the data as well (again on a separate drive)...better to go with SSD?

I'm thinking even for heat issues alone the SSD may be the better bet.
Data storage is currently 10 GB in one folder and 5 GB in another so space is not an issue. Even if data doubles over the lifetime of this computer any SSD should work. Not worried about cost.

But I thought I read somewhere that for data it was okay/preferred just to keep using HDD? Is that so?

Any advice appreciated!