SSD drive replacement for laptop

BeautifulLoser

Hi,

For work I've a Dell Latitude D830 with a 64gb SSD drive. According to Dell, that's the largest Dell hd available for this particular machine. However they do have larger (capacity) ones for other laptops in the Latitude range. There are also 3rd party ones like this: (SNM125-S2/160GB Intel X25-M/Kingston SSDNow M Series 160GB SATA 2.5IN internal SSD)


My question is, will these work in my laptop? I know I'd have to keep the housing from my current drive. I can't see why they wouldn't work but then why wouldn't Dell support them (their own one at least!)

Any help is much appreciated. Don't want to buy a €600 ssd to find it doesn't work

Tillotson

The way I understand it is that it is a bit of a waste to get intel drives for notebooks as you aren't particularly interested in sustained reads and writes.http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=688&type=expert&pid=7^ stupid IE won't let me put in linksI'd love an intel ssd but I'm gonna wait a wee while for ssd's to become more standardised and for proper linux filesystems optimised for ssd mature.9 months ssd's will be half the price and better.

Solitaire

Unless you have a second HDD in there avoid MLC-based drives as they're only practical as (very fast) storage drives - put them under intense IO and they literally wear to pieces due to fragmentation (different than that of conventional HDDs and hard to repair) and damage to the actual cells themselves.

That said MemoryC have a SSD sale on at the moment and there are other deals out there so have a look at the higher-capacity 2.5" SATA offerings and see if you can see anything juicy out there. Just bear in mind that 120GB+ SLC drives cost big bucks!

Tillotson

The intel x25-m uses MCL has a stated mean time before failure of 1.2million hours (around 136 years). There were degradation issues which didn't effect the physical cells and were completely fixed with new firmware. I think we're past the stage where early adopters are going to get burned with teething issues. Which drives in particular are you talking about?

BeautifulLoser

Thanks for the replies! The Hd would be the only hd in the laptop - for os and storage.

I'm not looking for any drive in particular.

> 120gb
ssd

and is compatible with my laptop!

Something like 120GB OCZ Core Series V2 SATA-II 2.5" SSD Solid State Disk
or the Intel one mentioned before
or something like this dell one

are any/all of these compatible with my laptop?

Blazer

As long as the drive is 2.5inch and is SATA you can fit it into your laptop.
I've a 128gb in my D630 with no problems even though Dell don't offer it with them..they tend to keep those for the high performing drives.

Tillotson

All 2.5 inch sata drives should work. It all depends. If it was me I'd still wait because of the price. The pcper link I posted discusses some of the issues and there are good reviews on anandtech.com, check out the "ssd anthology". Alienware and Lenovo are using the new Samsung PB22-J and that's available on www.overclockers.co.uk. There's a lack of good reviews about it though. Intel x25-m would be the most solid and expensive. But you know a company like intel won't hang you out to dry after dropping that much on their product. Stay away from the OCZ core range, these were plagued with stuttering issues stemming from jmicron controller. Look instead for the Vertex range, OCZ still have to recover trust from that debacle IMO. The pcper article i posted above reviews a corsair drive and discusses some of the issues particular to laptop users. And don't trust anything I say because all I'm doing is regurgitating other peoples opinions. Go do your own research. -- If this comes out as a wall of text, sorry.

BeautifulLoser

Mathew Reilly wrote: »

As long as the drive is 2.5inch and is SATA you can fit it into your laptop.
I've a 128gb in my D630 with no problems even though Dell don't offer it with them..they tend to keep those for the high performing drives.

Just what I wanted to know! Thanks.
Think I'll go for the Intel 160gb - since I'm not paying.

Thanks again..now all I have to worry about is whether Vista's complete pc restore functionality works :rolleyes:

Solitaire

Tillotson wrote:

The intel x25-m uses MCL has a stated mean time before failure of 1.2million hours

Yeah, but sitting around looking pretty doesn't hurt the MLC. Nor does read operations (hence my earlier comment).

Write operations, on the other hand, hurt MLC plenty. And they ain't quick either.

Tillotson

Yea quoting MTBF is a bit irrelivant. Nobody really knows how long 10,000 write cycles will take.

But Intel has a 3 year warranty, but they also have an agreement with OEM's that they'll guarantee them for 5 years at 20GB per day writes. Samsung and OCZ have a 2 year warranty.

Wear within intel drive is addressed with the recent firmware update. Even before this update the a "used" loses some write speed but read spead is unaffected.

Speed. Lets look at the Intel x25-m vs VelociRaptor:
Random 4k Write 23 MB/s vs <2 MB/s
Sequential Write 71 MB/s vs 118 MB/s
Random 4k Read 54 MB/s vs <1 MB/s
Sequential Read 240 MB/s vs 118 MB/s


And obviously ssd crush hard disks in terms of latency which makes them ideal for a boot/application drive.

Yes they are too expensive at the moment but if I had that kind of money I'd definately be getting one.