My Sony Vaio is about Two years old. I love it, upgraded to Windows 8 (haters gonna hate, but I think it’s great), and it’s been running relatively smooth minus a few driver issues here and there.
Rather than do my every 2- or 3-year ritual of buying a new computer, I feel that my technological needs no longer warrant getting a new computer. No amount of web surfing, YouPorn or Age of Empires II requires an Alienware or a behemoth, and I like the keyboard on this machine.
What I was thinking about, was upgrading my rickety-record-looking-thing hard drive to a solid state. SSDs, I was told, would save power, boot up my computer faster, and allow me to play around with my laptop on the couch without worrying about scratching the disc drive, which I have done many many many many times with my three previous laptop/notebook/netbook computers.
If I’m plunking down about 4-500 dollars for a SSD (I need about 4-500 gigs, so that was a rough estimate), and putting the old one in my shell as a backup, is it worth it?
TLDR: Should I spend money getting a fancy hard drive? Is it as awesome as advertised?
To me it’s not worth it. I bought a 2 terabyte HD for $75 on black friday two years ago. Recently, sams was selling a 3tb for $100. I can live with slower speed for 26 cents to the gig, not 1+ dollars to the gig.
I’d wait a few more years, maybe if it was 50 cents a gig.
I can’t speak for whether or not upgrading the drive in an older laptop is worthwhile. But the difference between a HD and SSD for your primary drive is night and day.
Meh. SSDs are not generic “make your computer faster” things.
The computer will boot a lot faster. When you start a program, it will start faster. Games will load levels faster.
If you are hitting your swap file a lot, it will be a lot faster. Most people aren’t hitting their swap file that much, so this is a non-issue for the average user.
Mostly, though, for what most folks spend most of their time doing, they won’t notice any speed increase at all, other than the faster boot time. Internet surfing will not be faster. Games will not play faster (other than the above-mentioned loading speed). Most applications spend most of their time accessing RAM and don’t hit the disk very hard, so speeding up the disk doesn’t provide them any benefit at all.
Depending on what you use the computer for, the only difference you may notice is the faster boot time. Everything else may run pretty much exactly the same.
For me, the faster boot time isn’t much of a benefit so it’s definitely not worth the money to me.
The OP mentioned damaging disks. That is a definite benefit to consider. I’m apparently a lot more careful with my laptops. I’ve never damaged a disk, so that’s a non-issue to me. Definitely seems to be an issue for the OP though.
The basic consideration for the OP is whether the faster boot time and the shock immunity are worth the extra cash. That’s probably the only place where you’ll notice any difference.
SSDs are magic, I wouldn’t consider a PC without it. That said, they are expensive if you need capacity. I’d go for 256GB model, that seems like the sweetspot at this time.
You can get one of those DVD drive tray kits to put in a larger capacity mechanical drive if you need extra storage space. Providing of course you’re not using a bunch optical disks, which I imagine you’re not. You can put in your current drive just as storage and upgrade later if you hoard more stuff. This won’t help against the damaging things though.
SSDs are indeed magic, but I would advocate still replacing your PC every 3 years or so. Mechanics wear out, things get old and dusty, hard drives fail.
As others said, it’s not going to speed things up very much. And also $4-500 is a lot to put into a two-year-old PC. I’d get a smaller SSD and offload much of the stuff (music, movies, etc) onto an external drive. If it was a desktop computer, I’d put the larger conventional HDD inside.
I put one in my netbook. Love it. But I did it for altitude reasons. Much over 10,000 feet and hard drives have problems. Air gets to thin to provide a ‘cushion’ between the head and the drive.
Most people regard the SSD as the best bang for your buck when it comes to upgrading your machine (maybe next to upgrading your RAM if you’re still limping along with only 4GB).
Is there space in the laptop for two drives? Some people yank the optical drives out of their laptops and put in a second drive. That way you can have a (small and less expensive) SSD for the system and frequently used applications and still hold all your files in a larger (cheaper) hard drive.
You can also buy hybrid hard drives that have large SSD caches. I’ve put one in my current laptop and apps do seem to launch faster.
No. Anything to do with the disk will indeed be much faster but from what you indicate, what you do rarely touches the disk apart from launching stuff.
Your best bang for the buck will be to upgrade the RAM to at least 8 GB. But after that, a SSD is your go-to speed-up device. Avoid OCZ - they have something of a reputation for poor quality and rumour has it that they’re about to go bust - and prefer Samsung. I have a Samsung SSD in this box.
I’m evaluating the same kind of options… a machine with 8 gig RAM and a large HDD vs. a machine with 4gig RAM and an SSD. The CPU and GPU are identical in both.
So my question is, would the performance of the 4gig SSD machine be as good or better than an 8gig HDD machine, given that swapping pages to memory and drive is the performance metric? The machine won’t be for intensive game play or disk intensive apps. Just internet browsing and streaming.
Re: swapping out the laptop, it’s certainly something I’ve considered. It’s just that it seems…iunno, wasteful? Really, my android phone handles torrents, so the basically all that’s left for my laptop to do is a bit of modest streaming, the few ROMs and old Windows 98 games I play, and type and do spreadsheets. It’s got 4 gigs of RAM, and until the AC pin cracks (or whatever will be the first to go, but this was the case with the netbook), it seems like a great investment.
Besides, I can always pull it out of the laptop when it’s outlived its usefulness, and throw it into another machine, even another tower if I so chose. Right?
It is definitely worth it. A lot of people seem to be suggesting a ram update but…honestly…what would he be running that requires much RAM?
A mechanical hard drive is by far your biggest bottleneck in the computer. Replacing it with a solid state drive will make the computer snappier in a way you will immediately notice and appreciate.
The trick is to get a size that will hold everything you need - plus 20%. Stick to essentials, and put your old mechanical drive in an external hard drive.
With Windows 8, AOE 2, and a few larger programs, I think 128gb should be plenty. Put everything else (videos you no longer watch but want to keep, archived photos, etc etc) on the mechanical external drive.
In terms of data integrity, the SSD is FAR superior. If you drop your laptop (which DOES happen) with a mechanical drive, there is a great chance you will have a head-crash that will immediately destroy data.
Also, the hard drive is a very easy installation on a laptop.
Please, don’t choose RAM over the Hard Drive - you are going to come back here posting how little a difference it made.
