Updating to an SSD . . . on a laptop?

[Schadenfreude]

Hey there.

I've heard time and time again that upgrading to an SSD is the most effective way to upgrade your system - you'll notice much more pep on most applications, faster loading, etc.

But is it really practical to put one in a laptop?

I mean, not the 17" and large "laptops" but the 15" smaller ones where there's typically 1 HDD bay, etc. It's just that I was looking at possibly doing so up my wife's laptop and it just doesn't make economic sense, especially on anything over 60 gigs in size - I definitely see the advantage to having one in the desktop where you can have an SSD as your "main" drive and another mechanical drive as a storage drive, but on a laptop?

Your thoughts?

 

[hans007]

well if you don't need that much space 64 gb ssds are like $80 sometimes after a rebate or something.

i know the kingston 64GB had a deal at costco and it even includes a little case for the old drive so you can carry that around with the computer if you need space fo rlike videos or somehtinng

 

[mnewsham]

If you can live on USB flash drives, and external HDD's then it works wonders, Or if you just dont save a lot of things.

 

[Schadenfreude]

Well, I game a lot on my laptop regularly (steam) and she's got some media on hers: which means unless I'm playing pretty much one single game I'm going to max out the SSD and she just doesn't like having to carry around extra stuff dangling off her laptop.

So it sounds like - generally from what you guys said - that in casual, everyday-use, SSDs are far from being practical if you're looking for portability.

 

[Fox5]

Get an external, preferably esata. You can install steam and its games to an external with no problem.

 

[dighn]

Well if you game and have media I think it'd be too inconvenient unless you get a large-ish drive. A 80GB drive works for me, but then I have a file server that I can access over the air. Even then I had to swap steam game installations around when I was using the laptop for games.

 

[hans007]

probably your best bet would be that seagate that is an 4gb ssd and 500gb 7200rpm drive combined. it seems pretty good and its like $80 on sale sometimes.

 

[Tom]

I think people misunderstand some reviewer's point about an SSD.

It isn't going to make a big improvement, but if you got a fast cpu, plenty of memory, etc, it will make a superficial difference in some relatively unimportant ways compared to a hard drive.

The capacity of a hard drive offers a much more useful feature than saving a few seconds here and there load times. A large hard drive in a laptop means you can bring more apps, games, more photos, movies, music, without carrying a seperate device.

A laptop in sleep mode uses very little battery, and will start instantaneously, with a hard drive.

And ssd is not close to as reliable as a hard drive by several magnitudes.

 

[coffeejunkee]

I disagree, the difference is much more than "superficial in unimportant areas". It takes care of the biggest bottleneck that has been hurting pc usage for the last decade, that awful slow mechanical hdd. Which gets constantly used by the os and makes everything else slow because it's really bad at doing more than one thing at once.

Also I'd say a ssd is much more reliable because there are no moving parts. Don't really understand how you can call hdd reliable in the first place, it's probably the most failure sensitive piece of hardware in any pc.

As for the TS question, yes they're expensive when compared to an hdd on a GB basis. If you're not willing or able to give up some storage the question becomes moot.

 

[Vincent]

If I get an SSD in my laptop I will replace the optical with a hard drive. I hardly ever use the optical drive.

 

[Fox5]

I think people misunderstand some reviewer's point about an SSD.

It isn't going to make a big improvement, but if you got a fast cpu, plenty of memory, etc, it will make a superficial difference in some relatively unimportant ways compared to a hard drive.

The capacity of a hard drive offers a much more useful feature than saving a few seconds here and there load times. A large hard drive in a laptop means you can bring more apps, games, more photos, movies, music, without carrying a seperate device.

A laptop in sleep mode uses very little battery, and will start instantaneously, with a hard drive.

And ssd is not close to as reliable as a hard drive by several magnitudes.

The reliability thing depends on the SSD, Intel's drives have proven to be very reliable.

Anyhow, do you really need a lot of space?
My friend just put a 60GB ssd in his laptop, and converted the old harddrive into a portable external. If you're already carrying around a 5 pound laptop, you need a bag anyway, just keep the external in there too.

 

[Tom]

I disagree, the difference is much more than "superficial in unimportant areas". It takes care of the biggest bottleneck that has been hurting pc usage for the last decade, that awful slow mechanical hdd. Which gets constantly used by the os and makes everything else slow because it's really bad at doing more than one thing at once.

Also I'd say a ssd is much more reliable because there are no moving parts. Don't really understand how you can call hdd reliable in the first place, it's probably the most failure sensitive piece of hardware in any pc.

As for the TS question, yes they're expensive when compared to an hdd on a GB basis. If you're not willing or able to give up some storage the question becomes moot.

Hard drives haven't "hurt" pc usage..what are you talking about ? Are there people who don't use pc's because of hard drives ?

Hard drives are slower than other storage mediums, but they are also much bigger and more reliable. The slowness is compensated for by caches and proper programming so it isn't really an issue. The only easily measurable difference between a hard drive and an ssd is boot time and loading apps or large amounts of data. Because hard drives do these tasks in a matter of seconds, the fact that an ssd does it faster doesn't make much real difference.

It comes down to this..you can't do anything with an ssd you can't do with a hard drive, you can just do some things a little faster. And that saved time amounts to a few seconds a day for most users.

But you can do things with a hard drive you can't do with an ssd. Mainly you can take a lot more stuff with you. And if you consider the time it takes to move things from a hard drive to an ssd equipped pc, when you want to change what you are carrying with you for example, you'll actually spend way more time moving stuff around than you can possible save with the ssd.

And ssd is inherently less reliable because of what an ssd is. The number of times you can write to a bit of ssd is limited, to get around this ssds have redundancy built in to a degree, but no one really knows how well a typical consumer grade ssd will work after 5 years use, or ten years. Hard drive storage on the other hand is well proven to typically last a very long time. Even decades.

 

[dighn]

Have you ever used an SSD? While on paper the performance gain isn't that big for every day tasks, it is HUGE in perceived performance because those little gains are at where it really matters i.e. from the time you click something, to the time something happens. Application launches, update installations and dynamic module loading in large applications no longer get in my way of using my computer. The difference is quite dramatic in that now more often than not the computer waits for me, instead of the other way around. Whether or not it's worth the extra cost is a personal decision, and to me it is worth every penny and I put one in every machine I own and frequently use.

As for reliability, an SSD maybe much better than a harddrive in a laptop due to the mechanical shocks a laptop is likely to be subjected to.

 

[Chapbass]

As for reliability, an SSD maybe much better than a harddrive in a laptop due to the mechanical shocks a laptop is likely to be subjected to.

This right here. I can't tell you how many hard drives I've had to replace due to shock and vibration. Honestly, I feel that HDD's are the most unreliable component in a computer, and the sooner we can move away from them, the better.

As far as the limited number of writes, please see Anand's article on how this is pretty much a useless argument point. I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but it wasn't very long ago.

 

[Emulex]

simple test if you need ssd:
task manager less than 100% on cpu load? look at hard drive light blinking.. wait...wait..

simple test with ssd:
cpu pegged at 100% hd flies

 

[hmsrolst]

I use an 80GB Intel X25-M in my Lenovo x200s, and it's great: boots in about 40 seconds, very snappy and no vibration or noise. If you don't need more space, get one!

 

[ctk1981]

I have forgotten how spoiled I was with my ssd drives until today. I picked up a Thinkpad T410 yesterday that came with the standard 250 GB WD blue label drive. The system seem so slow and in all honesty was starting to anger me that I had paid what I did for something this slow. But, not to worry...I had picked up one of the 120GB Intel X-25m drives that newegg had on sale. Once installed I was greeted by a whole new machine....very responsive, boot up times faster, shut down times faster etc...just doing simple things like opening programs made a huge difference.

 

[htwingnut]

If you don't use your optical drive much, then buy a caddy and put a hard drive in the caddy. Check out NewmodeUS for some.Then you can have an SSD as your boot drive, and hard drive for games and data.

Windows is a different experience with an SSD, especially in a laptop over even the faster 7200RPM drives.

If you strictly run an SSD in a low power draw laptop then it can also improve battery life significantly, depending on which SSD, just bypass the Kingston V-Series (SNV425), as it consumes more power than a hard drive. You also get a silent and vibration free drive too.

 

[Tom]

I'm posting mostly to provide some balance as Anandtech is definitely pro ssd. I'm not anti ssd really, I just like to point out the drawbacks of an ssd and the limited benefits.

The drawbacks for a laptop are relevant in this topic and they are pretty big. The solutions proposed, take less stuff with you, take an extra device, do away with the optical drive, are all big compromises for the sake of saving 30 seconds on initial boot, which is the only significant advantage of an ssd for an average user. Sure an app might load in 2 seconds instead of 5, which feels snappy, but doesn't affect usability the way not having as many apps with you does.

Reliability..failure of a hard drive from dropping a laptop isn't a measure of reliability, reliability is a measure of ability to function in normal use, not a measure of resistance to abuse.

power- an ssd is going to use more power than a hard drive that isn't running which is the true state of the hard drive much of the time in a properly setup maximum battery life profile. You can design a benchmark to show an ssd uses less power, but it isn't representative of typical usage.

 

[Fox5]

I'm posting mostly to provide some balance as Anandtech is definitely pro ssd. I'm not anti ssd really, I just like to point out the drawbacks of an ssd and the limited benefits.

The drawbacks for a laptop are relevant in this topic and they are pretty big. The solutions proposed, take less stuff with you, take an extra device, do away with the optical drive, are all big compromises for the sake of saving 30 seconds on initial boot, which is the only significant advantage of an ssd for an average user. Sure an app might load in 2 seconds instead of 5, which feels snappy, but doesn't affect usability the way not having as many apps with you does.

Reliability..failure of a hard drive from dropping a laptop isn't a measure of reliability, reliability is a measure of ability to function in normal use, not a measure of resistance to abuse.

power- an ssd is going to use more power than a hard drive that isn't running which is the true state of the hard drive much of the time in a properly setup maximum battery life profile. You can design a benchmark to show an ssd uses less power, but it isn't representative of typical usage.

Counterpoints to all of these:
People went for years with sub 100GB laptops, the size of currently affordable SSDs is fairly spacious. And you're probably carrying your laptop in some type of bag, throwing in an extra harddrive (or that dvd drive you popped out) isn't that big a deal. And who really uses disks in this day anyway?

I'd say the improvement from an SSD is not limited to just boot time, it is extremely noticeable, especially when multitasking or in programs that hit the disk frequently. Firefox is one of those programs with frequent disk access, and generally when any program 'feels' slow, it's due to disk access. I would take an SSD over a faster cpu, any day of the week.

Reliability - SSDs are quite reliable now, for the good ones at least. And I'd say "resistance to abuse" is a more important factor anyhow. If you even move your laptop while it's on, or sit it on your lap at an odd angle, you're creating additional stress on your hard drive and it's not going to survive as long as it would have in a stationary system. I'd say the usage scenario of laptops and especially netbooks almost necessitates an SSD for long lasting life, laptop hard drives have had the highest failure rate of any component in a computer, as far as I've seen.

Power - power difference is minimal either way, but how about this, an SSD will increase the speed at which your computer finishes a task, allowing all its parts to exit their high power states and go into idle states

There are downsides to choosing an SSD over an HD, they are almost exclusively:
Price, size.
And the advantages:
The biggest performance boost you can do for your system in these days of pumped up cpus and overpowered graphics cards. (unless you don't have one of those)
Way more abuse tolerant for an in motion system than a hard drive. Also, more resilient to high temperatures caused by a laptop in heavy use with poor ventilation.

 

[Tom]

100 gb laptop is a crippled laptop. No way anybody uses a 100 gb laptop unless they spend time moving stuff off and on it, time which is much greater than any time savings from ssd.

optical drive..
1. never ever watch a dvd movie on your laptop ?
2. never ever need to install a program from a disk ?
3. always download games and apps, taking several hours to do so and you can't do it on the road away from wifi.

Who never ever does any of those things ? Laptop with no optical drive is a crippled laptop.

ssd performance..have a modern laptop with a fast cpu, fast gpu, that can do everything you need fast and well ? Then adding an ssd might be the biggest performance gain you can add, but only because everything else is already optimized. That doesn't mean the gain from ssd is significant, it just means you don't need anything else. The ssd is still not adding much other than perception of speed, and using it is crippling the Swiss Army knife functionality of your laptop.

Sure, if the goal is the absolute fastest laptop rather than the most useful, then an ssd makes sense.

Carrying and using external hard drive and/or optical drive. There's more to it than carrying it with you. You have to remember it, you have to carry it, you have to hook it up, you have to find a workspace for your laptop and all the cables and stuff you have hanging off it.

In contrast, you can carry a fully equipped laptop in sleep mode, and you don't have all that external crap, you have instantaneous access, even faster than booting with ssd, and an extra c-note in your pocket.

 

[Fox5]

100 gb laptop is a crippled laptop. No way anybody uses a 100 gb laptop unless they spend time moving stuff off and on it, time which is much greater than any time savings from ssd.

optical drive..
1. never ever watch a dvd movie on your laptop ?
2. never ever need to install a program from a disk ?
3. always download games and apps, taking several hours to do so and you can't do it on the road away from wifi.

Who never ever does any of those things ? Laptop with no optical drive is a crippled laptop.

ssd performance..have a modern laptop with a fast cpu, fast gpu, that can do everything you need fast and well ? Then adding an ssd might be the biggest performance gain you can add, but only because everything else is already optimized. That doesn't mean the gain from ssd is significant, it just means you don't need anything else. The ssd is still not adding much other than perception of speed, and using it is crippling the Swiss Army knife functionality of your laptop.

Sure, if the goal is the absolute fastest laptop rather than the most useful, then an ssd makes sense.

Carrying and using external hard drive and/or optical drive. There's more to it than carrying it with you. You have to remember it, you have to carry it, you have to hook it up, you have to find a workspace for your laptop and all the cables and stuff you have hanging off it.

In contrast, you can carry a fully equipped laptop in sleep mode, and you don't have all that external crap, you have instantaneous access, even faster than booting with ssd, and an extra c-note in your pocket.

Everyone has different use roles, obviously.
Nope, I never watch a DVD movie, I have Netflix streaming (and a variety of others). If I really needed to watch a DVD movie, I'd rip it on my desktop first, and not deal with the battery killing dvd drive on the laptop, not to mention laptop dvd drives generally suck and have never been able to properly read half the disks I put in them.
I can't remember the last time I bought a physical copy of software. Everything is downloadable now, especially games.
I'm not ALWAYS downloading games and apps, and besides, do stores even carry PC software anymore? It's not like I'm going to be buying and installing the latest copy of MS Office while I'm on the road. The success of netbooks and thin and light laptops shows there's quite a few people who do not need a disk drive.

I strongly disagree that the improvement from an SSD is barely noticeable. I think it's huge, even on a low end dual core, and everyone I know who has experience one agrees. Actually, they tend to think the reduced boot times are the smallest improvement they notice from the SSD.

Who carries a bare laptop by itself for any extended period of time? That's asking for it to be stolen or broken. And you already need to remember the power cable, at the very least. There are usb powered externals, you don't need to remember anything other than to pack it away into your bag.

A laptop with an SSD in sleep mode resumes even faster than a harddrive. This is actually somewhat of a bad thing, I've seen laptops that resume from sleep so fast that the wifi hardware hasn't yet, causing the wireless device to disappear.

When a computer with a harddrive boots or resumes from sleep, even after the desktop pops up there is still stuttering for sometime. This doesn't exist with an ssd, it's 100% usable immediately.

 

[ctk1981]

I think some of us have very very different requirements of a laptop.

 

[Tom]

I don't use optical drives much either, I have laptops with them and without them.
It's pretty handy to pop in a Red Box dvd while away from home.
It's pretty handy to install a 5 gb game from a disk instead of spending 3 hours downloading it.
It's handy to install drivers from an included disk for an obscure add-on or printer that doesn't have drivers online.
It's handy to burn a dvd with files,pics,videos for a friend or relative to keep, much faster for large quantities than doing it via wifi.
Also handy for backing up critical files on the road.

I see one good reason for a laptop without an optical drive, portability. That means a laptop/netbook with no space for an internal optical. What's recommended here, a bigger laptop and replacing the optical with an ssd, results in a pretty specialized laptop with less functionality for the sake of speed.

 

[Emulex]

i've used the dvd on my laptops (all dozen) maybe a dozen times. usb installs of o/s are faster nowadays esp if that usb is backed by a nasty ssd the old 128gb jmicron are perfectly cheap since it's a read only gig to install.

internet access is everywhere so use the cloud man. unless you live in the styx i think that goes for most of us.

SSD takes up more power than alot of lower power hard drives i lost 30% of my runtime going from a 1.8" 4200rpm 120gb to an 80gb x18-m - werd.

But yeah give me the crappest walmart special laptop with an ssd ANY DAY over the best laptop on the planet with a 500gb 5400rpm please. i can't stand watching 4 cores wait for a huge disk queue.