Best SSD for an old Vostro 1000

[spdfreak]

I have an old Vostro 1000 with a Athlon II 64 running win7 and 4 G of RAM. I know the bios doesn't really support SSD's but people are using them to get more life out of the laptop and speed it up a bit. I also want to get better battery life and I know some SSD's are not much better than a platter drive. Any recommendations on the best drive for this?

 

[razel]

As long as the Vostro 1000 utilizes SATA drives (it probably does) then ABSOLUTELY buy an SSD. I have been recommending SSDs as a 1st priority upgrade to anyone I know who has a laptop or recently bought one and I haven't heard anyone regret their purchase yet. You will not be getting much more in terms of battery life. As a fellow laptop owner it's your screen brightness, followed by the age of your battery and that determines that most.

You'll be fine with any current model SSD. Just buy one a size higher than you need at the price/GB you can afford. Currently an awesome price is .50 per GIG in the U.S. If you can wait, I highly recommend the Samsung 840 250GB when it goes on sale for $140-$150. I have seen that sale price at least three times this year.

 

[lightningbaron]

The Dell Vostro 1000 seem to have a SATA port. A SSD will definitely help with the battery life to some degree. It is also dependent how of a charge your battery holds. In terms of pricing, the best that I have seen is about .58 to .67 per GB (USD).

 

[aviator78]

I would also recommend a Samsung 840. Not sure which size suits your Vostro best. 120 if you do not have that much programs, 250 ist most suitable.

 

[spdfreak]

I think the issue is that it is old enough that even though it is SATA, it uses 1.5 and there are not any options to set any modes so the speed of the drive doesn't matter so much. Looks like the Sandisk drives are the lowest power consumption.

 

[razel]

Seriously, don't even think about power consumption. You'll be splitting hairs and in real life, with respect for battery life, it is your screen brightness and battery health that will matter most. Hell, even just having a webpage with a busy, badly programmed flash ad banner that consumes CPU cycles or leaving a sucky USB thumb drive plugged in that gets hot because it has nutty idle power usage will be bigger concerns than SSD/HDD power consumption.

By the way, if you haven't bought one yet, the Samsung 840 250GB is currently on sale from buy.com off ebay for $150, free shipping, plus tax, if applicable.