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Install an SSD and Improve Your Laptop Speed, Reliability and Battery Life – Part 1
Posted by gabriel torres in Notebook PC | May. 19, 2009 7:00 AM
One of the easiest ways to improve your laptop speed, reliability and battery life is replacing its hard disk drive (HDD) with a solid state drive (SSD). Let’s discuss this possibility.
Solid State Drives (SSDs), as the name suggests, use solid-state components (i.e. semiconductors) to store data. The components used are flash memories. Hard disk drives (HDDs), on the other hand, use magnetic platters to store data. Because of that it has a read/write head and motors for spinning the platters and moving the heads. SSDs provide the following advantages over HDDs, because they are 100% electronic components, not using a single mechanical part:
- Speed: the data transfer rate of SSDs is far higher than HDDs, as there is no delay involved with moving heads.
- Reliability: hard disk drives can be damaged if you drop your laptop, as the heads can touch the magnetic surface and scratch it or the heads can literally break.
- Battery life: consumption of SSDs is reduced as there are no motors to be fed.
Of course there are some disadvantages:
- Capacity: while you can easily find HDDs on the terabyte range nowadays, the biggest SSD available today has 256 GB.
- Pricing: SSDs are far more expensive than HDDs. A 256 GB model can cost over $600 (1 TB HDDs cost around $140; with this amount you can only buy a 32 GB SSD).
Ok, you have already upgraded your laptop memory (which is a far cheaper upgrade and should be done first) and you have the money to move to the next step. What should you do?
You need to buy an SSD with the same physical size as your current HDD: 2.5” or 1.8”. Check the size by opening the hard drive compartment on your laptop (which is located on the bottom part of your portable) and reading what is written. You will also need an SSD with storage space bigger than the current amount of space currently used on your hard disk drive.
Next week we will show you how to install your new SSD and how to copy what is inside your current HDD to your SSD.
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drift--why you trippin? (Not bad swagger for a white boy--eh?) It takes time to write these articles. Hardware secrets has the best, most complete, and understandable info. that I have found. I have only been at this for about a year. My education in just four weeks of using hardware secrets has exceeded $80 worth of purchased books. Lotta bad books out there. I like man that says what he means Drift, but we're all in this mess together. Like the power of your words man, you're telling it from the heart, at least.
before you even consider an SSD first read about the market:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
The main thing to read from this is run away from any SSD that uses a JMicron controller, and if you can afford it buy an Intel X series drive and upgrade the firmware...
Finally use Windows 7 and format using Windows 7 so your alignment is correct.
That's before event considering an SSD of any type!!
Who in their right mind on Internet would wait for week, have time and remember to come back to this page to read next part week later ???!
What is next week project? Opening toolbox? In year or two new drive will be running with this temp... Run away people...
You say HDDs are available up to 1TB at only $140, but there aren't any _laptop_ drives available over 500GB, and they're generally more expensive per GB than a desktop drive. You can actually buy a 512GB SSD, which is larger than any mechanical drive available for laptops!