SSD for Laptop

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mitunchidamparam

mitunchidamparam

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Jan 14, 2012
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I have a toshiba laptop with a dual core centrino and it has 2 hard disk slots with 250 GB each.
I was thinking of upgrading one to a SSD.
My problem is , I dont know whether the SSD will be compatible.
The SSD are 2.5 inch so they have the same size , but how can i know whether the mother board is compatible.
My second question is i have a budget of 60 euro and I live in netherlands and this is a good reference about the price here :
http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/cat/674/solid-state-drives.html#filter:XYzLCsIwEEX_5a67qI8q5gMKLgSh7sRFSUYYSdswiSCU_rsTNRtnM8w5c--MO0tMZ2FLFx7o1L9gxqf31b_gsYhJHEnL5B0MgvAj4ge7SZKyPlolIUc_sbpCtJN8y5tyFEOebCLXBbJHF2Gu2Gt63WxwU6u0ZZ9I1MxY1Ye8hpzFttbR1yHXYpdPLMvyBg

I saw that there are the ssd in my price range. :


OCZ Octane-S2 64GB 62 euro
http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/298194/ocz-octane-s2-64gb.html

OCZ Vertex Plus SATA II 2.5" SSD 60GB 65 euro
http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/273393/ocz-vertex-plus-sata-ii-25-inch-ssd-60gb.html


OCZ Petrol 64GB 60 euro
http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/298056/ocz-petrol-64gb.html

Corsair Nova Series 2 60GB
http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/285801/corsair-nova-series-2-60gb.html

Finally i want to know :
Whether my mobo is compatible
Hich one should i buy
 
Solution
CaedenV
SSDs simply run on SATA, and will work on any computer with a SATA connection. They will work faster if your mobo can do AHCI mode, but they are still pretty mindblowing in good old IDE mode. As an example, my wife's PC is a little older, and does not support AHCI, and will only do SATA2 speeds. I installed an OCZ Solid3 in it and it has worked just fine from day one. On the other hand I have a monster rig, and installed a much larger/faster Agility 3, and the throughput difference is notable, it is not worlds apart difference in speed comparing the 2 systems in day-to-day use.

Remember SATA 2 can still manage 300MB/s, and SSDs rarely perform much above that. My Agility 3 (in real world tests, not synthetic benchmarks) tends to do...
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How old and what exactly is the model of your Toshiba laptop? If it supports SATA connections for your HDDs, then it should support a SSD. If however, it only supports the older IDE interface, than you will have a problem with getting an SSD to work.
 
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SSDs simply run on SATA, and will work on any computer with a SATA connection. They will work faster if your mobo can do AHCI mode, but they are still pretty mindblowing in good old IDE mode. As an example, my wife's PC is a little older, and does not support AHCI, and will only do SATA2 speeds. I installed an OCZ Solid3 in it and it has worked just fine from day one. On the other hand I have a monster rig, and installed a much larger/faster Agility 3, and the throughput difference is notable, it is not worlds apart difference in speed comparing the 2 systems in day-to-day use.

Remember SATA 2 can still manage 300MB/s, and SSDs rarely perform much above that. My Agility 3 (in real world tests, not synthetic benchmarks) tends to do ~150MB/s for uncompressable data, and then ~320MB/s on compressable data, so there is little real world difference in performance running it on a SATA 2 device or SATA 3 device.

I would avoid the Octane and Petrol drives as they are on OCZ's first gen Indilinx controller, and have some performance issues. I would lean more towards a Vertex 2/3, or Agility 2/3 if possible, though the Corsair is a little better than both of them. Also, look into Mushkin Chronos as they have gotten some stellar reviews and are typicaly as cheap as the Agility series while outperforming Vertex 3 in many benchmarks.


All that being said; Even the slowest SSD is going to blow your mind compared to a HDD... especially a notebook HDD, and the only thing you need to concern yourself with is the height of the drive, but that should not be an issue with 60-64GB drives.
 
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Solution

The laptop is 3 years old and this is the spec of the laptop
http://nl.computers.toshiba-europe.com/innovation/jsp/SUPPORTSECTION/discontinuedProductPage.do?DISC_MODEL=0&ACTION=PRINT_WITH_BACK&service=NL&PRODUCT_ID=1062784#0
some of it are in dutch this is a translated version
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fnl.computers.toshiba-europe.com%2Finnovation%2Fjsp%2FSUPPORTSECTION%2FdiscontinuedProductPage.do%3FDISC_MODEL%3D0%26ACTION%3DPRINT_WITH_BACK%26service%3DNL%26PRODUCT_ID%3D1062784%230&act=url

How can i know whether it has a sata or ide , can i see it when i remove it?
 
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I saw in some reviews that the ocz petrol and octance have their own controller , but i thought this would be better because it is easy for them to update firmware better than a third party controller.
One more thing , is 64 Gb enough for windows 7 and starcraft 2.
 
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Hello,

To tell the difference between SATA or IDE - normally SAta connectors are about the size of your pinkie. With internal IDE drives - they usually have either a bunch of pins (I think it's around 40) that stick straight out. Some might even have an adapter.

Take a look at this PATA SSD:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssd-transcend-pata-upgrade-solid-state-drive,15162.html

Those are "IDE" based. If you see straight pins that look like that - it's most likely IDE.

Check this out for SATA connector:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
 
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Yes. If you are using windows 7 - It will take about 20GB of space - I believe SC2 takes around 8GB of space. If you do get an SSD - you will have to disable hibernation as it takes up the amount of RAM you have and dumps it on your SSD. So it is unnecessary wasted space.
 
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Thank you a lot for your information.
i will update you guys , after i take a look at my laptop.
 
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Apparently, that laptop will support a SATA-1 connection. This means that a SATA-2, (3gb/s) or SATA-3 (6gb/s) will work, only at the slower 1.5GB/s speed.

Using the translated link you provided, I was unable to determine if you had two discrete 250GB HDDs or one 500GB partitioned into two 250 GB partitions. If the former, then you could simply replace one of them with the SSD, and still have 250GB of your old storage available. If the latter, then you might have to completely replace your 500GB HDD with the SSD, losing all of your storage.
 
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My laptop has 2 discrete HDD each with a capacity of 250 GB.
So i would need to replace only the master HDD with a SSD.
The slave 250 GbB can reamin.
You said that it has support of SATA 1, so aacording to the benchmarks the SSD will not bottleneck it right in real world perfomance?
 
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You will have a little bit of a bottleneck with SATA 1 - however unlike the HDD - your SSD will max out the bandwidth of your SATA connection, and it will still be much much faster than your HDD.

The access times of a SSD are in the range of .01 ms, and HDD's have a access time of about 6 ms. As you can see - access time would be about at least 100x faster.

Edit: You shouldn't see any real world performance difference using only a SATA 1 connection ( it will still be lightning fast). Only through benchmarks you might see a difference.
 
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at a given SATA level, any SSD will be faster than the HDD it is replacing, so No, it will not bottle neck the rest of your computer.

Can you get all of your data on one of the 250GB HDDs? If so, you won't lose any data. Be aware that if you replace your boot drive with the SSD, you will need to do a clean install of the operating system, and re-install all of your applications, to insure that the registry will be correct.
 
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Sata 1 will decrease the performance more so than SATA II, but still faster than a HDD.
With 64 gig SSD you will have only about 50 gigs avalable, so
1) disable Hybernation
2) disable, or limit size , restore points. Over time restore files can eat a lot of space.
3) manage your page file (virtual Memory), try setting the Min/max to 2048. You can also relocate the page file to the HDD.
4) Move My Docs folder and temp files to the HDD.
5) When you get the prompt "where to install", for lesser used programs have them install to the HDD.

NOTE: unless you install using AHCI you will lose Windows 7 TRIM cmd. SSDs have what is Known as Garbage collector which will mosly overcome the loss of trim.

I installed an SSD in an older Toshibia A205 - worked fine. Also installed in my A305 toshibia.

Added: Concur with clarkjd , do a clean Install, NOT a Clone of your HDD. Also remove the 2nd HDD so that the SSD is the only hard drive installed then replace the HDD when windows 7 installation is completed.

Also - After SSD is up and running make sure you use windows 7 back up function (in control panel) to create a system image. This image can be placed on the 2nd HDD, or on a set of DVDs.
 
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RetiredChief makes some good recommendations. 😀
 
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Thank you guys for all your replies.
April52012_Laptop_HDD

These are the images of the HDD in my laptop
I think my laptop has a IDE connector, so I should look for a IDE SSD
 
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My HDD looks like the picture of the HDD above.

I fixed the broken link, sorry for the inconvenience
https://picasaweb.google.com/117865179184096338440/April52012_Laptop_HDD?authkey=Gv1sRgCIrD_v-u8rmd3wE

When I was looking in the BIOS i saw that there was a option called SATA with 2 options : one was AHCI.
This means that it is a SATA connector right?
 
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Yes you will definitely be able to use a SATA SSD. AHCI is actually just stands for Advanced Host configuration interface.

If/when you do get an SSD, make sure to take out your other HDD first, and only put in your SSD. Also before you do any installtion of the OS, in your BIOS make sure AHCI is enabled. AHCI allows TRIM commands to pass through the SATA ports.
 
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Oh, okay thank you very much guys for confirming that it has a SATA interface.

Now I need all of your help in choosing a SSD with a enough room for both windows 7 and Star craft 2.
As pointed out earlier in the forums , 64 GB SSD would be more than enough for me.
In the beginning of the forum I had given links to the different SSD available in the Netherlands and asked a opinion about it.
I want to know what would be best for my budget.
 
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Hmm I looked at all of them. I can't really reccomend any of them.

I would consider something like the Crucial M4 64GB SSD. It's not the fastest SSD, however it should be more stable than the ones you listed:

http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/zoeken/?keyword=64GB+SSD

If you do go for the crucial version...you might want to -not- get the slim version, as it is only 7mm thick versus regular 9mm thick SSD's/HDD's.

I currently run the Crucial M4 128GB SSD version* (actually my system is down at the moment, dead GPU), however it is still very fast and very stable.
 
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