Would you say adding an SSD to a laptop would make a huge difference?

[vbuggy]

at work we just got some dell precision desktops and laptops both. The laptops have a much slower cpu, (I7 2720QM) but have a ssd drive, while the desktops have a 3 something ghz xeon and 7200 rpm mech. drive. The difference is staggering. So much so that I will venture to say you are nearly better off just running a older system for most things with less cpu power if you are going to throttle it with a 7200 drive. For christmas I bought my wife a samsung 830 to upgrade her two year old dual core laptop, it will be just the shot in the arm that it needs I think.

Yup. And leave the Momentus XT's to the wishful-thinking

 

[86waterpumper]

well earlier on I had thought of the momentus as a solution...but then I read TONS of people complaining that there are issues with it, such as momentary freezes and lags etc. Heck that is the whole reason to get something better in the first place is to avoid such nonsense

 

[rchiu]

Yup. And leave the Momentus XT's to the wishful-thinking

Heh well you may think it's wishful thinking, but I just got a a6 AMD lappy (they are so cheap with all the sales) and moved my xt into the new lappy. Moved my 200gb of steam games on it and happily playing on it all for under $500. Windows still launches fast, programs still launches fast. Still got lots of HDD space. That's real world benefit and not some synthetic benchmarks good for self satisfaction.

And if you read amazon feedback complains on xt, bunch of them are from the Mac crowd. you know how dumb the crowd is and how picky those hardware are. And the overall rating is still close to 4 star with all those complains. I have absolutely no problem with my XT and you can see from my post, I am extremely happy.

But hey, each to his own. I have no problem if you guys wanna be limited to little hdd or spend big bucks on big sdd. I have ssd myself like I said, but just think xt is a much better bang for the buck in notebook situation.

 

[vbuggy]

Yeah - I absolutely get that if you don't have the bones for an SSD of anywhere near the same capacity then it's the only optimisation option you have.

It's just that when you start from the 'This is the better compromise regardless of cost' standpoint, you come across as a BSer because the everyday performance is far, far more comparable to a regular 7200RPM HDD than an SSD.

 

[Silenus]

Absolutely worth it, even on an old setup. For example I have quite an older slow laptop. It's an early Celeron M (core 2 based) single core. It came with a death slow 5200 rpm old laptop drive running XP. That quickly became tear-your-eyeballs-out painful to use because everything just made the drive thrash like crazy. So I put in a 40GB Intel X25-M, and now run Windows 7. The 40GB is one of the slowest SSDs, installed on a SATA I port (no SATA II !), and running what is now a VERY slow outdated CPU....and the difference it makes IS STILL NIGHT AND DAY!! It is actually useable. No it is not as snappy as a modern SATA III SSD on a fast dekstop...but the machine is actually useable and responsive now, where before you wanted to blow your brains out.

That is difference an SSD can make....even with a 'slow' SSD....on a slow SATA port....in a slow computer....

It's fair to say that were it not for the SSD upgrade I would long since have been forced to buy something newer and faster just because of the unresponsiveness of the original setup. It has definitely extended the useful like of the machine since I don't use it for anything very CPU intensive anyway. Money well spent! I've been able to hold out long enough that I will be ready for a new Ivy Bridge ultrabook as a proper upgrade when they are available.