Notebook upgrade to SSD?

[Ian]

For the purposes of researching an article on SSD I am about migrate the Windows 7 64 environment on my laptop to an SSD drive.

I wasn't optimistic the 120GB SanDisk Ultra SSD was large enough but after recently installing W7 64 and the applications I regularly use (Office 2010 Pro, Adobe CS5.5 Production Premium, Lightroom 3.5, etc.) on the laptop's 500GB Seagate Momentous conventional HD I was pleasantly surprised to find that only 30GB of space was used (ignoring my documents). 70GB or so of document space should be manageable and I'm considering a supplementary semi-permanently attached 32GB low profile USB drive (I use an 8GB one for ReadyBoost caching at the moment and this won't be required when the SSD is installed).

My laptop is quite elderly (2008 vintage HP tx2130ea convertible tablet/notebook with resistive touch screen) running a modest AMD Turion X2 64 2GHz processor. I have upgraded RAM (2Gb to 3GB and probably 4GB (max) eventually), OS (Vista to Win 7 32 and now Win 7 64), and the original 250GB 5400rpm HD to 500GB 7200rpm. It all works surprisingly well.

So it will be interesting to see if the SSD gives the system a worthwhile extra boost, including battery stamina.

No migration tools are included, so I'm hoping SanDisk will come up with a solution for that because it's not just a case of copying from the old drive to the new (formatting and other storage configurations need to be different for the SSD).

So I was wondering if anyone here has already switched to SSD either on a laptop or a desktop - what was your experience?

Ian

[rogleale]

Re: Notebook upgrade to SSD?

Hi Ian,

Yes, I updated my desktop to an SSD recently. My computer is a self built running an AMD Phenom ll x 4. I used a Crucial 128GB SSD which crucially (pun intended!) came with cloning gear included, so all my careful preparation with Acronis was unnecessary. I did however move all my music, videos, and documents off the C partition before changing the HDs over
The cloning gear consists only of a short cable, one end USB, the other mates to the SSD - mounted the SSD - connected to a USB port on the computer - ten minutes later rebooted into Windows 7 in 45 seconds instead of 75 seconds from the HD. It leaves me 29GB free of the 119 available.

Lots of the programmes boot up faster as well, most notably Bridge and CS5.5

Roger

[Ian]

Re: Notebook upgrade to SSD?

Good news, Roger

That's a fast system you have. My desktop box is still depending on an AMD Athlon X2 64 5600 (2.8GHz) and XP! Will be updating that to Windows 7 Pro 64 bit soon and maybe an SSD for the OS and programs too. 64GB might be all I need.

Ian

[Ian]

Re: Notebook upgrade to SSD?

Because Adobe CS5.5 requires 64-bit Windows, I have upgraded my laptop from Win 7 32 bit Home Premium to 64 bit Win 7 Pro, via a clean install. This is a bit frustrating because I only recently did a clean install to 32 bit Windows a couple of months previously as part of an upgrade from the original 250GB 5400RPM hard drive to a shiny new 500GB 7200RPM drive. I have to say that my laptop is really rocking now, despite being three and half years old - and that's prior to fitting the SSD and upgrading from 3GB to 4GB RAM.

Photoshop CS5.1 Extended edition is a big step up from CS4, by the way. The Merge to HDR tool has been extensively updated, for a start. Lots more to discover there and to help I'm attending a Photoshop seminar being held by Adobe tomorrow. Will report back afterwards!

Ian