SSD's...

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[H]F Junkie
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Mar 31, 2001
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Anyone tried replacing their laptop hard disk(s) with SSD's ?

I am curious about getting 2*16G mtron mobi's for my 64-bit linux laptop.

I have 160G sata's right now.

Anyone tried this?

Edit: I have also been eyeing the 266x speed compactflash cards with a sata -> CF adapter. I could get by with as little as 8G storage if the performance was awesome.
 
What are you curious about? Its really a no-brainer. You just take out your Laptop drives and put the SSDs in. You don't need to do anything special (as long as your laptop drives are SATA). The SSDs are recognized as normal hard drives. The MOBIs will run circles around your laptop drives. The CompactFlash solution won't be anywhere near as good as the MOBIs.
 
266x CF is ~40MB/sec. 7200RPM drives can sustain ~80MB/sec, s o you're loosing bandwidth at the same time you're significantly cutting latency. It might perform somewhat faster but the results probably won't be dramatic.
 
I'm wondering if it's worth doing. I know it's going to be faster, but I'm also wondering if it will increase battery life. My current laptop drives are 5400 rpm.

I really don't use more than 8->16G most of the time on my laptop so could live with that for space.
 
DanNeely said:
266x CF is ~40MB/sec. 7200RPM drives can sustain ~80MB/sec, s o you're loosing bandwidth at the same time you're significantly cutting latency. It might perform somewhat faster but the results probably won't be dramatic.
Click to expand...

That is sequential speed. If I was doing sequential speed tests, I'd be using iscsi -> server.

I'm interesting in random access, boot time & overall system performance for daily apps.
 
Robstar said:
I'm wondering if it's worth doing. I know it's going to be faster, but I'm also wondering if it will increase battery life. My current laptop drives are 5400 rpm.

I really don't use more than 8->16G most of the time on my laptop so could live with that for space.
Click to expand...
If I am not entirely mistaken, the Mtron Mobi and Pro SSDs are not particularly energy efficient. There are other MLC SSDs that consume much less power when idle, and might even be cheaper, but will not be nearly as fast. Several manufacturers have recently announced their intent to produce MLC SSDs with higher performance, but they are not yet available, afaik.
 
Kaldskryke said:
If I am not entirely mistaken, the Mtron Mobi and Pro SSDs are not particularly energy efficient. There are other MLC SSDs that consume much less power when idle, and might even be cheaper, but will not be nearly as fast. Several manufacturers have recently announced their intent to produce MLC SSDs with higher performance, but they are not yet available, afaik.
Click to expand...

I did some bonnie++ with an 4G memory stick pro and was getting ~ 4500 seeks/second. very impressive. The problem is 10M/second transfer rate really sucks :)
 
Wow, going from two 160's down to two 16's. Talk about a sacrafice :eek: For the cost, I don't know if I would consider that kind of a cut.
 
Ockie said:
Wow, going from two 160's down to two 16's. Talk about a sacrafice :eek: For the cost, I don't know if I would consider that kind of a cut.
Click to expand...

The thing is that most of my 160's stay empty. 90% of the time my files are on my fileserver @ home. When I'm travelling, I'd prefer less power usage, less heat, more reliability, faster bootup/disk access. I can pick up 8G usb sticks (and easily cram four of them into a usb2.0 hub) for $29.99 ea at microcenter (they perform adequately). There is my expandability if I need some more space. Why not go ssd? It is also trivial to buy a $40 external usb case if I want one of my 160's for backups.

Even if I don't go mtron and go with something like CF, the prices are getting dirt cheap:
16G 133x - $83 shipped (@ egg)
8G 133x - $44
8G 266x - $84 after MIR
 
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