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Is an SSD the best laptop upgrade? Which one to get?

M

Martin

Lifer
I have a laptop that's getting a bit old - it's a macbook pro that I got over a year and a half ago, with a 2.5ghz core 2 duo and 4gb ram.

The HD is one of the few things I can upgrade, so I was wondering if replacing the 5400rpm disk drive with a decent SSD would give me a noticeable performance and battery life improvement. Also, what's the best bang-for-buck SSD on the market today? I'm not in a big hurry, so should I wait a few months for something new to come out?
 
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My old roommate put a SandForce SSD into his MBP, one of the early unibodies, with the removable battery, and I am pretty sure he would say it has made a world of difference.

He kept his hard drive and put it into the optical drive bay, and then did a clean install, and I just recall him saying that it was incredibly fast, day to day stuff takes almost no time whatsoever, apps open almost instantly, and the system is incredible responsive.

These mirror my thoughts on my MBA with SSD.
 
Definitely, especially over a 5400 RPM. You might be able to find a good deal on a SATA2 drive which is all yours would support anyway. The new SATA3 drives should drive the price down fairly quickly. Keep your eye out for deals.
 
economically, just get a 7200rpm SATA, 500GB. don't get samsung NCQ, terrible with heavy multitasking, and there is no way to shut off the NCQ (garbage).

a lot of the WD Black drives fail too, so be careful if you're still thinking about the 7200rpm route.

as far as SSD's go, if you aren't hampered on price, 256gb for about $500.

otherwise, I wouldn't spend over $200 on an SSD drive which gives you about a hundred gigs. And for what space is offered past 200 bucks, is not worth it in my eyes if you don't want to go crazy with the wallet, especially if you could just carry a 500gb mini-external drive with you for less than a hundred bucks..
 
Yeah, SSD makes a good difference. My Air has a 128GB SSD in it and the speed isn't comparable to SATA spindle disks. The machine boots in well under a minute (Snow Leopard). And a virtual machine of WinXP I have installed boots in 11 seconds. If you want a significant increase in speed (even though that machine is nothing to sneeze at, my 1ish year old Air is WAY less machine than that at 2.1GHz core 2 duo and 2GB of RAM), definitely go for an SSD.
 
Yes, the SSD is definitely the biggest upgrade that you can make. I like the Intel X25-M 120GB for OSX because they are less reliant on TRIM (which Apple doesn't enable on non-Apple SSDs, bastards). The new Intel 320 SSDs should be good as well once they hit the market.
 
Martin said:
I have a laptop that's getting a bit old - it's a macbook pro that I got over a year and a half ago, with a 2.5ghz core 2 duo and 4gb ram.

The HD is one of the few things I can upgrade, so I was wondering if replacing the 5400rpm disk drive with a decent SSD would give me a noticeable performance and battery life improvement. Also, what's the best bang-for-buck SSD on the market today? I'm not in a big hurry, so should I wait a few months for something new to come out?
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A SSD is highly recommended if you want your system to feel more responsive. Two considerations, however:

1) How much storage space you can realistically live with? Unless you've got a big budget, you'll have to live with less space.
2) What are your workloads? A SSD will make applications open faster and help with disk-intensive tasks, but it's not going to speed up anything that is CPU-bound.

Another note: do your research carefully before choosing an SSD! Lots of folks are having problems with sleep/hibernation with certain SSDs and certain Macbook configurations. Don't choose a drive by benchmarks alone. I had to return two Sandforce-based drives for this reason. The price and performance were outstanding, but what good is that when your computer crashes when coming out of sleep?
 
I forgot your battery life question. Most 5400 RPM notebook drives are very power efficient. I can't imagine that your hard disk accounts for more than 15% of your battery usage, so even if the SSD used half as much power you'd only see a trivial gain in battery life. And from what I've seen, many SSDs are not much more power efficient than a 5400 RPM laptop drive - so most people (including me) have not seen any serious increases in battery life. If you did some battery benchmarks, you'd probably be able to measure the difference, but it's not going to be large.
 
TrackSmart said:
I forgot your battery life question. Most 5400 RPM notebook drives are very power efficient. I can't imagine that your hard disk accounts for more than 15% of your battery usage, so even if the SSD used half as much power you'd only see a trivial gain in battery life. And from what I've seen, many SSDs are not much more power efficient than a 5400 RPM laptop drive - so most people (including me) have not seen any serious increases in battery life. If you did some battery benchmarks, you'd probably be able to measure the difference, but it's not going to be large.
Click to expand...

I agree here. While the performance boost in switching my laptop to SSD was beyond huge (went from a 5400 rpm something to an OCZ Agility 64gb) the power savings weren't noticeable, if there at all.

Edit: By 'beyond huge' I'm not exaggerating when I say that my almost-4-year-old laptop still feels very snappy. I've got no urge (beyond the normal) for an upgrade at all.
 
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