I know, short answer = “If you wont miss the money”
I would need at least a 500GB drive, so around $250.00. My laptop is 3 years old.
Specs:
i5 2450M / 2.5 ghz processor
Geforce 540M graphics card
8GB RAM
Still decent, but 3 years old. In your experience, would installing an SSD revitalize my laptop? Will it seem blazing fast again?
Anymore my answer is always going to be, “yes, Yes, GODDAMNIT YES.” SSDs are such a massive improvement in performance that I will never again go without. That said, you don’t need a 500GB SSD. My laptop currently has 2 drives, both SSDs; one is in place of the optical drive that never got used. My primary drive is, I think 120GB, and the secondary drive is around 150. I just today bought a replacement for the secondary drive, a 240GB SanDisk SSD for 60 something bucks on sale on Amazon (today only, while supplies last, etc). It could just as easily be a cheap 1TB conventional drive.
Pick up a cheap drive, transfer your system files to it, and then for whatever you need to put 500GB of stuff on get a slow spinny drive and either install it in a secondary bay or just keep it external. Or if $250 isn’t that big a deal to you, go for it. I don’t think you’ll regret it.
yes. it’s (figuratively) painful for me to use the PCs at work which still have hard drives now that my home PC/laptop have SSDs. When I log in every morning, I sit there staring at the screen grumbling “Come on, already.”
True, that would be cheaper, and I do have a 1TB external that I use for backups. But I dont want to have to bother carrying an external drive around for my data files.
If the laptop has a hard drive activity indicator light, do some normal operations and see how much the light stays on. If it blinks for long periods of time or goes solid, a SSD should make those operations a lot faster.
8GB of RAM should be plenty unless you’re running some sort of heavy-duty apps that are filling up your memory. In that case more RAM couldn’t hurt either.
This may be a stupid question. Is there any difference in how data is stored on a SSD vs a traditional HD? I know there is technically, but does the difference matter to the user other than the increase in speed?
If I have a recent system image on my backup drive, should I be able to pop in a SSD and quickly have everything back the way it is or is it possible I may have to do a clean install?
you can “ghost” or clone your drive from a hard drive to an SSD. when I got my current laptop, I used Macrium Reflect to clone the original drive to the SSD.
Yes, absolutely, yes. I’ve installed SSDs on much older computers and there is still a very noticeable performance boost.
Also, if you shop around you can probably find a 500 gb SSD for less than $250. I just bought a 500 gb Samsung 850 Evo for $150. That was an uncommon sale, but it’s routinely selling for $160-$200 on Amazon.
Yes. Any computer with even the basic core 2 duos from 6 years ago will show a huge speedup with an SSD. In fact, I suspect even those single core pentium 4s would benefit.
Now, the huge speedup is spinning_rust->competently made SSD. If you already have a decent SSD from a credible manufacturer (some of the early OCZs and other cheap SSDs had these issues that would result in catastrophically bad performance, even freezes), upgrading the SSD is barely/never worth it. With a decent SSD, the processor becomes the bottleneck, and you won’t see any perceptible boost from a nicer SSD.
My real world experience with SSD is that the huge speedup you see is mainly for apps starting and the OS starting up, once the apps are up performance is not all that hugely different.
People forget that on a modern PC the OS loads most of the disk data accessed into system RAM anyway. Also writing data to an SSD “disk” is much slower than reading it.
You’ll get a noticeable performance boost but it’s not life changing in terms of everyday browsing and use.
Astro is right…except there’s a huge qualitative difference. It makes all the programs you have on your ssd feel like they are right at your fingertips, that you can instantly access the tool.
<aside> I put a SSD in my netbook because the read head kept bouncing off the spinning disk. Took me quite a while to figure out what was going on. The errors I got where bizzar.
Note that this is something I’m not particularly gentle with, and was operating it at very high altitude. Air density is important to disk drives as it uses air to keep the read head off the disk.
Disk drives are rated for the low pressure of airplanes (about 7000 feet) or a bit more. Your specs might very.
Anywho, I’m VERY happy with the SSD in my netbook. Purrs right along. Haven’t had any problems with it since I put in the SSD.
Don’t keep us in suspense. Regale us with tales of blazing fast windows performance, as if your laptop were a gaming rig from 2008! (around that time new hand built gaming rigs for PC gamers started having SSDs standard)