Best Upgrade for Laptop. RAM or SSD?

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kinein

Limp Gawd
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Sep 10, 2010
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Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4830T-6642
* Main usage, School, notes, document/essays writing, web browsing/social media
* Main reason for purchase: The battery life had at least over 7 hours for many people
* Pricing : versus the Macbook Pro and Toshiba Portege - I went with this for price and screen size.

- I'm a senior at a CSU, taking 6 courses, with one huge fat 6 hour block of class once a week, the remainder tend to be 4 hours for the night classes.


I guess I have 3 questions.
1. Which is the better upgrade for this laptop - getting 8gb of Ram or and SSD

Options - Ram (as posted by someone on hardforum) 8GB from Corsair
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233081
Option2 - SSD, OCZ SATA2 Deal in the HOT DEALS section
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...tails.asp?EdpNo=1068616&csid=ITD&body=REBATES

2. I read in a 2008 Tom's Hardware article that SSD's actually lower laptop battery life, is that still the case? If so by how much?

3. Would I really see a difference going from 4 -> 8gb Ram?




Product Features

Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium,2nd Generation Intel® Core? i5-2410M Processor 2.30GHz
4GB DDR3 Dual-Channel Memory,640GB hard drive,14" HD Widescreen CineCrystal? LCD display (1366 x 768)
Intel® HD Graphics 3000,High-Definition audio support,Two built-in stereo speakers
Webcam,Multi-gesture touchpad,802.11b/g/n WLAN-gigabit LAN
Bluetooth®,USB,HDMI?,Card reader,6 Cell Battery,1-Year limited warranty.

Processor, Memory, and Motherboard

Hardware Platform: PC
Processor: 2.3 hertz Intel Pentium 4
Number of Processors: 1
RAM: 4 GB
RAM Type: SDRAM

Hard Drive

Size: 640 GB
Type: ATA100
Speed: 5400 rpm

Graphics and Display

Graphics RAM: 128 MB

Ports and Connectivity

USB Ports: 3

Cases and Expandability

Size (LWH): 9.41 inches, 13.33 inches, 1.18 inches
Weight: 4.88 pounds

Power

Rated Charge (normal use): 9 hours



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SSD, less power consumption, you won't tell the difference between 4gig and 8 gigs with writing essays and surfing the web. Get yourself an SSD.
 
I don't think word processors are bloated enough to need more than 4gigs yet.
 
I'd have to agree with all so far. SSD will give you a more noticeable performance increase for your purpose. But I'll be honest, neither are totally necessary for your application.

I'm not sure about draining your battery more than an HDD. Don't know the logic there. I wouldn't think it would be worse than a HDD.

Upgrading from 4 to 8GB, you won't see much of a difference. I went from 4 to 8 to 16GB and didn't see any noticeable increase in performance.
 
cmadki4 said:
I'd have to agree with all so far. SSD will give you a more noticeable performance increase for your purpose. But I'll be honest, neither are totally necessary for your application.

I'm not sure about draining your battery more than an HDD. Don't know the logic there. I wouldn't think it would be worse than a HDD.

Upgrading from 4 to 8GB, you won't see much of a difference. I went from 4 to 8 to 16GB and didn't see any noticeable increase in performance.
Click to expand...


It's been a while. But last time I read about power usage, mechanical drives are supposed to go to sleep when not in use (tho i'm not actually sure when that is.) While ssds don't.

Not sure how new ssd works tho.
 
I would assume that an ssd doesn't sleep because it only consumes any significant amount of power when be accessed/used. The ssd version of sleep, if you will.

Anybody got the facts on this?
 
cmadki4 said:
I would assume that an ssd doesn't sleep because it only consumes any significant amount of power when be accessed/used. The ssd version of sleep, if you will.

Anybody got the facts on this?
Click to expand...

Yeah, i just looked around a bit and new SSD's go into standby at 0.3w. The old articles no longer apply.
 
Your laptop is using an ATA100 drive, which means you have PATA not SATA. I have never seen an SSD with that connection, so I think you're out of luck upgrading to one of them. Plus it will severely limit the speed of an SSD, as that is max 100Mb i think. Your laptop already has 4GB of ram, so more won't really help. I run windows 7 with multiple larger programs running with 2GB just find on my laptop.
 
Biznatch said:
Your laptop is using an ATA100 drive, which means you have PATA not SATA. I have never seen an SSD with that connection, so I think you're out of luck upgrading to one of them. Plus it will severely limit the speed of an SSD, as that is max 100Mb i think. Your laptop already has 4GB of ram, so more won't really help. I run windows 7 with multiple larger programs running with 2GB just find on my laptop.
Click to expand...

Not sure what your thinking, but if you look the spec's up on line, it's a SATA2 drive in that laptop.


To answer the original question. SSD >> All.

SSD is the difference between Word taking 10 seconds to open, and 1 second, or Photoshop taking 20 seconds versus 2. It is literally a night and day difference as compared to a HDD. The RAM is nice, but it's more of an incremental upgrade, very few people really need more then 4gb of RAM with everyday use, but everyone would see dramatic performance increases with SSD.

SSD's are basically a wash for battery life. They "should" be more efficient, but so far the goal has been increasing speed, which as they've finally actually maxxed a SATA2 connection, maybe they'll start trying to improve power useage.
 
Zumino Zufeilon said:
Not sure what your thinking, but if you look the spec's up on line, it's a SATA2 drive in that laptop.


To answer the original question. SSD >> All.

SSD is the difference between Word taking 10 seconds to open, and 1 second, or Photoshop taking 20 seconds versus 2. It is literally a night and day difference as compared to a HDD. The RAM is nice, but it's more of an incremental upgrade, very few people really need more then 4gb of RAM with everyday use, but everyone would see dramatic performance increases with SSD.

SSD's are basically a wash for battery life. They "should" be more efficient, but so far the goal has been increasing speed, which as they've finally actually maxxed a SATA2 connection, maybe they'll start trying to improve power useage.
Click to expand...

nm read the specs wrong. The ATA100 under the HDD section threw me off.


Also, the current gen of SSD's are already reaching the limits of sata III. They blew past sata II after the first gen of SSDs.
 
Last edited:
Thanks to all that contributed to this discussion. If anyone else has anything to add I'd be happy to hear about it.

I just find it confusing how some places state SSDs actually diminish power and other people state other wise. I do realize that the Tom's Hardware article was from 2008, and it is almost 2012. So it would be reasonable to believe that a lot has changed since the debut of SSDs.
 
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