Is an SSD worth it in an old laptop?

[Herr Kutz]

EDIT2: Got one. Resuts are in post #30.

EDIT: Conclusion: yes it appears to be worth it. I have a new question in post 26 if anyone would care to help. Thanks!

The keyword here is old. The laptop is an HP dv5000 from the summer of '06. Specifically, it only has a SATA 1.5Gbps controller, core duo processor, and 2GB ram. Would an SSD give actual real world benefits?

Also, would coming close to filling up the SSD slow it down too much even considering the limited speed I could expect with the SATA 1.5gb/s interface?

Here is the benchmark of my mechanical HDD:

 

[Coup27]

Absolutely.

I have breathed new life into 3 old laptops by putting an SSD into them. My personal Dell Lattitude D520 has a Core 2 CPU and only 1.5Gbps SATA and it still makes a big difference.

Remember the biggest benefits of an SSD are access times, latency and random reads - none of which are affected by only a 1.5Gbps connection.

Regarding slow down, its wise not to 100% fill an SSD but even in that state it's probably faster than a HDD.

Ironically I have just finished a repair for someone. They gave me an Acer Travelmate 5510 which has an AMD Turion x64 CPU and 1.5Gbps SATA in IDE mode. I've just installed XP from scratch, installed all the drivers and Windows updates in less than 3 hours. No way a HDD could do that.

 

[cytg111]

especially in an old laptop .. if you're not about FPS in whatever-game, an SSD upgrade in an old laptop will make it feel like a new one.
It will completely(ok, almost) remove the factor of waiting for data from the harddrive. So if what you're doing on your laptop is constrained by, say 50% cpu and 50% disc access, you will double your laptops performance with an SSD upgrade. Its that simple. And many thing is way more disc constrained than CPU .. so do the math

 

[Cerb]

The keyword here is old. The laptop is an HP dv5000 from the summer of '06. Specifically, it only has a SATA 1.5Gbps controller, core duo processor, and 2GB ram. Would an SSD give actual real world benefits?

Is your HDD feeling sluggish? Then absolutely. Where SSDs shine the most, even current ones can't saturate 1.5Gbps SATA. It's going from ~10ms/fragment to <0.3ms/fragment.

If it's old enough to not support NCQ (with Windows 7, that means AHCI turned on), then the difference will be even greater, since the HDD won't have the ability to hide latency through servicing other items in the queue, which is basically the only reason HDDs are still usable, today, IMO.

Also, would coming close to filling up the SSD slow it down too much even considering the limited speed I could expect with the SATA 1.5gb/s interface?

Maybe. If you have a chipset and driver with TRIM support, then some free space could gain you some performance. In such old hardware, however, chances of that are slim to none.

Without TRIM, the drive will reach a lower performance level and stay there, because you are relying purely on over-provisioning. Empty space, you see, without TRIM, is still used space to the drive (Samsung w/ NTFS being somewhat of an exception). Now, that lower performance, at least outside of Sandforces, is still pretty awesome, and you can apply TRIM manually on some drives, so it's not worth losing sleep over, but it is worth being careful in selecting your drive. OTOH, the common recommendations are basically shoe-ins, as the standard Crucial and Samsung are fairly cost-effective (sorry, Intel! ), and don't need periodic maintenance to remain fairly fast (Plextor's and Corsair's Marvell-based SSDs are even better about it, but they cost more, and you'll likely never notice the difference). It helps, but actual use is light enough that background GC does the job well enough, in practice. Just make the partition aligned, and go.

Ironically I have just finished a repair for someone. They gave me an Acer Travelmate 5510 which has an AMD Turion x64 CPU and 1.5Gbps SATA in IDE mode. I've just installed XP from scratch, installed all the drivers and Windows updates in less than 3 hours. No way a HDD could do that.

An HDD could, in another computer, but it would need to be a Raptor variant to do it in IDE mode.

 

[Avalon]

Definitely. My wife has an older Dell Latitude D620 with a Core Duo in it, and after replacing the 80GB 5400RPM Samsung in there with a 60GB OCZ Vertex Plus, it was like a whole new machine. It actually does things now.

Remember that in laptops, disk performance is especially bad, so an SSD here will make an even more drastic difference. This is why I've replaced all laptop hard drives in the house with SSDs first before moving on to my desktops.

 

[MontyAC]

The SSD will improve the performance. When you upgrade later, just use the SSD in the new laptop.

 

[Emulex]

yes yes yes. maxing out the ram, fresh o/s load and ssd will make it like new. be sure to clean out the fans and perhaps re-silver-goop the heat sinks while you are in there.

 

[exdeath]

Yes.

2.5" HDDs are the worst of all HDDs except for 1.8" HDDs.

 

[tweakboy]

Its literally a turbo double boost for your laptop. Things will pop up at you, youll be shocked. your 2 minute boot up will be 20 seconds or so.

documents will open up in a split second. Do it and you won't regret it.

 

[tweakboy]

32mbps on a old laptop I wouldnt touch it. But if you put SSD, I will gladly use it. I dont have time for chrome to open up in 10 seconds,, now will be instant ,,, photoshop 2 and half seconds on first launch hmmmm

 

[ronbo613]

I just put an SSD in a Sony VAIO with SATA1.5, it does make a difference. Uses less power so battery life is better.

 

[thescreensavers]

buy a 120 for like 80 bucks and be happy.

 

[theevilsharpie]

The keyword here is old. The laptop is an HP dv5000 from the summer of '06. Specifically, it only has a SATA 1.5Gbps controller, core duo processor, and 2GB ram. Would an SSD give actual real world benefits?

My laptop is about the same vintage as yours (including the 1.5Gbps SATA controller), and I recently replaced its old HDD with a 128GB Crucial M4 SSD.

It's definitely faster when starting from a cold boot, although the speed advantages during normal day-to-day usage are minimal. However, I have 4GB of RAM and I rarely shut down or reboot; once the OS and my most common programs are loaded, subsequent loads happen largely from cache stored in RAM.

Other benefits are no noise, and a slight increase in battery life.

Overall, if you're doing a bunch a disk I/O, an SSD will be better than an HDD speed-wise, even on an old computer. However, if you're just using it for light computing tasks like browsing, you'd be better off getting more RAM.

 

[Herr Kutz]

Is your HDD feeling sluggish? Then absolutely. Where SSDs shine the most, even current ones can't saturate 1.5Gbps SATA. It's going from ~10ms/fragment to <0.3ms/fragment.

If it's old enough to not support NCQ (with Windows 7, that means AHCI turned on), then the difference will be even greater, since the HDD won't have the ability to hide latency through servicing other items in the queue, which is basically the only reason HDDs are still usable, today, IMO.

Maybe. If you have a chipset and driver with TRIM support, then some free space could gain you some performance. In such old hardware, however, chances of that are slim to none.

Without TRIM, the drive will reach a lower performance level and stay there, because you are relying purely on over-provisioning. Empty space, you see, without TRIM, is still used space to the drive (Samsung w/ NTFS being somewhat of an exception). Now, that lower performance, at least outside of Sandforces, is still pretty awesome, and you can apply TRIM manually on some drives, so it's not worth losing sleep over, but it is worth being careful in selecting your drive. OTOH, the common recommendations are basically shoe-ins, as the standard Crucial and Samsung are fairly cost-effective (sorry, Intel! ), and don't need periodic maintenance to remain fairly fast (Plextor's and Corsair's Marvell-based SSDs are even better about it, but they cost more, and you'll likely never notice the difference). It helps, but actual use is light enough that background GC does the job well enough, in practice. Just make the partition aligned, and go.

An HDD could, in another computer, but it would need to be a Raptor variant to do it in IDE mode.

Could you elaborate a bit on the bold portion? I was specifically looking at the Samsung. What do you mean when you say they should be "maintained" periodically? I've also considered Plextor (their pricing is turning me off, however). Would the Plextor or Corsair's marvell based drives require this "maintenance" less frequently (or did you mean they do not require it at all)? I will likely near 100GB of space with the programs and miscellaneous data files I have currently, so nearing its max capacity and slow down is definitely somewhat of a concern. Especially if filling it so high requires more frequent maintenance. I'd consider a 256GB drive if it wasn't worth more than my laptop.


I'm pretty sure I can turn on AHCI mode.

Also, how can I tell if my chipset has TRIM support? I have a feeling the it won't, but I'd still like to check.

 

[Cerb]

Could you elaborate a bit on the bold portion? I was specifically looking at the Samsung. What do you mean when you say they should be "maintained" periodically? I've also considered Plextor (their pricing is turning me off, however). Would the Plextor or Corsair's marvell based drives require this "maintenance" less frequently (or did you mean they do not require it at all)? I will likely near 100GB of space with the programs and miscellaneous data files I have currently, so nearing its max capacity and slow down is definitely somewhat of a concern. Especially if filling it so high requires more frequent maintenance. I'd consider a 256GB drive if it wasn't worth more than my laptop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification

Some drives can run a TRIM pass manually, through special applications, rather than the OS automatically doing it as space can be declared free. Or, you can just go and use it, because, like Intel, they're using controllers and firmware that must also handle systems with no TRIM support, so they didn't skimp out of GC efficacy. Without TRIM, once you've written 128GB of physical blocks, GC is doing all the work with only the minimum over-provisioned space, and it'll be a wee bit slower, due to that, once all the blocks are written to.

Some drives, however, get more than just a wee bit slower. First-gen SF drives were notorious for that, among other issues. Samsung and Intel of the time didn't look as good out of the box, but ended up performing much better once the drives had been used for awhile. Today, some common, often cheaper, 2nd-gen SF drives still exhibit some major performance degradation, needing TRIM to get back to performing well, one of several reasons that Intel*, Samsung, and Crucial can keep their every day prices as strong as they have been. Even those drives that do get serious performance regressions are still faster than HDDs, just not as good as some other SSDs when used for awhile.

You have 27 hours and 20 minutes. Better hurry up!

* their SF firmware seems to have some secret sauce the others don't

 

[Coup27]

What Cerb has said is correct, but nobody has mentioned toolboxes. If you buy either an Intel or Samsung drive then you will have the ability to manually run TRIM yourself via the toolbox regardless of your storage drivers ability.

 

[Cerb]

Yes, I did kind of let that slip by, and that's one reason I'm personally a bit biased towards Samsung over Crucial, assuming the price difference is very small.

9 hours and 20 minutes, now.

 

[Herr Kutz]

Yes, I did kind of let that slip by, and that's one reason I'm personally a bit biased towards Samsung over Crucial, assuming the price difference is very small.

9 hours and 20 minutes, now.

Where is this deal? The one at newegg is out of stock and the 256GB at buydig has gone up in price if I remember correctly.

 

[Cerb]

Where is this deal? The one at newegg is out of stock and the 256GB at buydig has gone up in price if I remember correctly.

I was going by the Newegg sale page with the countdown. I didn't follow to the product page.

Interestingly, I've bought twice from Buydig, both of which were Samsung items on sale, though neither SSDs, and the price went back way up shortly after.

 

[Herr Kutz]

How would an Intel 330 do as an everything (not just boot drive, meaning I would store my files including mp3s, photos, etc)? Supposedly sandforce drives have some sort of performance issues with incompressible data, but what exactly does that mean? Is this only when transferring or moving incompressible files (like mp3s) and not when playing them?

 

[lakedude]

Hard drives clog up with junk over time. Comparing a freshly loaded SSD to a old clogged up hard drive is not a fair comparison. Now I have no doubt the SSD is going to be faster but at least compare with a fresh install on both. Just reloading the OS from scratch (with no extra crap) will speed up and old system, sometimes by a lot. I swear "they" do this on purpose so you will want a new system...

The advantage of a fresh install is that it is FREE.

 

[lakedude]

Another FREE option is to try Puppy Linux or FatDog64. These distros are super small and super awesome. They are so small they load completely to RAM so the whole SSD vs HD thing becomes a non-issue. They are amazingly feature rich, you would never know how small they are from the features they have. Regular Puppy is 32 bit while FD-64 is (you guessed it) 64 bit.

FatDog with a few windows open:

 

[kmmatney]

Yes, I did kind of let that slip by, and that's one reason I'm personally a bit biased towards Samsung over Crucial, assuming the price difference is very small.

9 hours and 20 minutes, now.

This only really matters if you are using Windows XP, I think. Otherwise, they all support trim in Windows 7. I have a few Samsung SSDs and only install the SSD Magician software to make sure my system is optimized, and then I uninstall it. For windows XP, you definitely want a Samsung or an Intel SSD, so you can manually TRIM it.

 

[Herr Kutz]

I ordered the Plextor 128gb M3S for $75 + $2.83 shipping since the price was right, and it seems to get great reviews. It should be here next week.

Just FYI, my computer is running W7 32-bit (my processor does not support 64-bit) Ultimate. I've also tried linux, and don't like that I cannot use most of my programs without hassle and workarounds.

And yes, I'll be doing a clean install.

Thanks for the help peeps!

 

[Eug]

For everyday business use and surfing, my 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with SSD feels faster than my Core i7 iMac with 12 GB RAM, because the i7 has a platter drive. And I have a slow SSD in my MacBook Pro.

My Pentium SU4100 went from annoying slow to decent with an SSD.

My dual-core Atom nettop went from painfully slow to OK with an SSD.

You'll LOVE your new SSD.