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Upgrading my D620 worth it?

Y

yowen

Gawd
Joined
May 20, 2011
Messages
664
Dell Lattitude D620

Is it worth it? It currently has a dual core T2300, 80gb harddrive and 2gb memory and an Nvidia NVS Quadro 110M and have it hooked up to a docking station to a 1080p monitor.

I was thinking an SSD and maybe another gb of memory would make it a little faster and I'd be able to use the SSD for a future Desktop or Laptop and the memory would be pretty cheap and I wouldn't be to concerned with reusing it. Would SSD's work in this somewhat older laptop?

Or should I just be happy with the laptop the way it is, I use it for photoshop, watching movies/tvshows, web browsing (10+ chrome tabs), web-design, I'll often do these things all at the same time and sometimes it bogs down a little bit, I'm thinking its filling up the memory doing all those things.

Also the fan seems to be working overtime this summer, is any of those cooling pad things with fans in them that connect to usb worth the money? Would they play nice with my dock?
 
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yowen said:
Dell Lattitude D620

Is it worth it? It currently has a dual core T2300, 80gb harddrive and 2gb memory and an Nvidia NVS Quadro 110M and have it hooked up to a docking station to a 1080p monitor.

I was thinking an SSD and maybe another gb of memory would make it a little faster and I'd be able to use the SSD for a future Desktop or Laptop and the memory would be pretty cheap and I wouldn't be to concerned with reusing it. Would SSD's work in this somewhat older laptop?

Or should I just be happy with the laptop the way it is, I use it for photoshop, watching movies/tvshows, web browsing (10+ chrome tabs), web-design, I'll often do these things all at the same time and sometimes it bogs down a little bit, I'm thinking its filling up the memory doing all those things.

Also the fan seems to be working overtime this summer, is any of those cooling pad things with fans in them that connect to usb worth the money? Would they play nice with my dock?
Click to expand...

if it's old and the fan seems to be working hard it may be time to open that chassis and clean the heatsink and fan assembly ^_^
 
4GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD and Windows 7 would be a nice upgrade. I would echo the need for a good cleaning.
 
Got a Dell Latitude D830 here, recently gave it a good "Spring cleaning" of the heatsink/fan assembly, redid the thermal paste with Arctic Silver (done properly, not just gooped on like toothpaste on a toothbrush), and the machine runs about 7C cooler than it did previously, and I undervolt using RMClock as well so it runs a good 4+ hours on the 9 cell battery in most situations.

The D620 is most certainly worthy of an upgrade, especially if you still have some warranty left (mine still has about 4 months on the 3 year warranty and I will extend it). Damned thing is built like a tank I swear. Thinking about upgrading the mobo at some point (I just have the Intel integrated graphics) to get a little more *umph* for a few more years out of it, but all the issues with the Nvidia GPUs on Dells (and the HP laptops as well) from a few years ago still has me concerned that it could up and die at any point.

I don't know if those Nvidia GPU problems were specific to the consumer class GPUs (GeForce) or they also had high failure rates for the Quadro based models, guess I need to do a bit more research. But then again, I'm not even sure the D830 ever had a Quadro option at all - could be stuck with just the GeForce class products. But, I suppose if I do grab a decent working mobo off fleaBay sometime and it does fail, I can always fall back to the Intel one that hasn't given me one lick of trouble since I got this machine at a pawn shop maxed out (4GB RAM, 1680x1050 matte LCD panel which is gorgeous, etc) for $150 last year.

But definitely, the D620 (and the D630 as well) deserve some upgrades if you're up for it. They're workhorse laptops, some of the best ever made and worth keeping functional for years to come.

Edit:
Yep, the D830 had a Quadro option, just found a board on fleaBay for $100 with a 256MB Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M, so that does offer me so potential for a little boost in performance from the video perspective. Cool... :p
 
I was given a D620 for a contract gig back in 2008. It's still my favorite Dell laptop ever. Last summer, I upgraded the LCD to 1440x900 and maxed the RAM. Like others have written, it's a little beast and well worth keeping.
 
Joe/Wolf, my D620 has been an absolute tank and workhorse, I sometimes have it running for weeks at a time, I recently dropped it (I was real pissed at myself) and I have just overall run the piss out of it. I am thoroughly impressed, its built strong!

The D620 will address 4gb with Win 7?

I notice pricing for an SSD around 80gb is $160 on newegg, is that about what I should expect to pay?
 
yowen said:
Joe/Wolf, my D620 has been an absolute tank and workhorse, I sometimes have it running for weeks at a time, I recently dropped it (I was real pissed at myself) and I have just overall run the piss out of it. I am thoroughly impressed, its built strong!

The D620 will address 4gb with Win 7?

I notice pricing for an SSD around 80gb is $160 on newegg, is that about what I should expect to pay?
Click to expand...

Also with aforementioned uses of this laptop should I expect significant speed increases?
 
yowen said:
Also with aforementioned uses of this laptop should I expect significant speed increases?
Click to expand...
I've been less than impressed with SSD speeds. Had one in my previous MBP. It booted about 15 seconds faster than with the stock drive. Now, the SSD is in my desktop. Again, the speed boost isn't what I expected and I wouldn't buy another one.
 
Somewhat complicated post ahead so, be warned, but the info is useful:

More RAM and an SSD will really let it breathe, and yes, it'll seem like a new laptop - but there's one catch with respect to the SSD: it's not going to be operating at full bore, and here's why.

I'm not 100% sure about this, so if I'm not at least I pointed it out and you can do research to find out for absolute confirmation, but I think the D620 uses a chipset which is limited to SATA I operation meaning a max of 150MB/s (that's 150 MegaBytes per second) on the SATA bus. My D830 has a newer chipset with full SATA II support and the Corsair F60 SSD I have in it gives me typical 260MB/s reads and about 230MB/s writes (sustained) in HDTach/HDTune benchmark runs.

So, no matter which SSD you purchase, there's a good chance you'll never get faster than 150MB/s sustained - but even if that's the case, with the extremely low random access time of modern SSDs (0.1ms - that's one-tenth of 1 millisecond, which is like 80 times faster than the fastest hard drives out today with typical 7 ms "best times" with typical 10-17 ms on average), you're bound to think it's a brand new machine period.

So don't go batshit extreme when it comes to buying an SSD - something like one of the Kingston V-series drives (the budget line) would still offer vast performance improvements over any physical hard drive you could put in there.

If I'm wrong, and the chipset on the D620 (the D630 has the improved Intel 965GM chipset, just like my D830 has) does support SATA II operation, then any decent SSD will offer you the best performance.

Worth looking into, for sure. I've owned a D630 and so I know it has the Intel 965GM chipset, I think the D620/D820 last used the older 945GM chipset which offers only SATA I operation.

Regardless, more RAM and any SSD will definitely give that laptop a new lease on life for years to come. ;)
 
There's TWO versions of the D620. One can run dual core CPU and the other can't, along with that goes different chipsets. I got one with a Celeron M and tried 2 different dual core CPUs and none of them worked.

I don't think the SATA speed matters that much. It's not like running a SATA-300 drive on a SATA-150 interface will increase the latency, just limit the max throughput.

If yours in the dual core I think 4GB RAM will give a decent boost in performance. SSD like you say can be used in a new machine, so spend what you wish on that.

It should be able to run Windows 7 for non-gaming tasks just fine.
 
more ram and a larger hdd will work nicely for that machine. I had my vostro 1400 for 2 years and my friend has it now and it is still running like a champ. It has 4GB and 500GB 7200 rpm hdd. was a decent upgrade for a vista home premium machine.
 
At this point I am thinking:

Harddrive:
This 5400rpm, 500gb:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136314
or this 320gb at 7200rpm
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148745

I'll utilize this to put an image of the old drive on the new one:
http://www.amazon.com/SATA-Drive-Caddy-Adapter-Latitude/dp/B004FM6YU4/ref=pd_cp_e_1

After that I think I'll switch the drives around, I imagine the original drive bay is faster as a boot drive?

I figure I hardly ever burn cd's anymore or even play dvd's on my laptop, if I do I can easily swap.

The 7200rpm drive I listed seems to not have any reviews, does it look good to you guys?

Do you guys see any flaws in my plan here?

Since this is veering into much different direction:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1037469110
 
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This is the hard drive I'd recommend personally:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145436 (This is a bare OEM drive, no retail packaging, lower cost)

The Hitachi 7K500 7200 rpm is one of the if not the best overall laptop drive on the market today. The Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB model is close in specs and performance but the Hitachi just edges it out on sustained reads and writes, it's the drive I use myself.

If you have the money and you're interested in massive storage with somewhat higher performance in some situations/daily use, the Seagate Momentus XT is a hybrid hard drive with 4GB of "SSD" storage on it for cached data; it's not a full blown SSD, obviously, but for data that's cached, it can provide some serious boosts and responsiveness to an older system, definitely. Unfortunately, it's twice the cost of the Hitachi I mentioned above (the Hitachi is $45, the Seagate is $100):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591

They introduced a 250GB model as well, Newegg carries that for $90.

The caddy is ok for doing the transfer and then you'd also have the ability to have more storage in the laptop if needed, obviously, but the battery life would suffer dramatically with two hard drives in constant operation. If you're plugged in the majority of the time it's a non-issue but it is something to take into consideration. I rarely take my D830 most anywhere and when I do I make sure to find an AC socket someplace too, I don't really go truly "mobile" for most any reasons.

You could - with the use of the hard drive caddy - still consider getting an SSD for your system drive (where the OS and primary apps are installed) and then use the drive in the caddy for raw storage too. All sorts of possibilities there...

I don't see any flaws in your plans, just take time to consider the options, then go for it. And definitely max out that RAM. :)

One last thing: consider that the performance off the hard drive in that caddy is most likely not going to match up with what you're expecting: the expansion bay on the D620 doesn't actually use an SATA optical drive, it's an IDE port so it's limited in terms of bus bandwidth; it shouldn't make any difference in the long run as long as that expansion caddy is used for secondary storage: you're not going to get better performance from that than the native SATA controller the primary hard drive is attached to. That's your boot drive, so again an SSD would give you the best possible performance overall.

Those Corsair Force GT SSDs that were just released have insane performance from what I've read: over 500MB/s on reads and writes, and the 60GB model is supposed to be $150 retail - that's crazy fuckin' ludicrous speed for not much money in the long run. Might be something to consider for the system drive, or some other SSD.

Good luck... and definitely post some benchmarks when you get this "new" D620 up and functional... :)
 
Joe Average said:
This is the hard drive I'd recommend personally:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145436 (This is a bare OEM drive, no retail packaging, lower cost)

The Hitachi 7K500 7200 rpm is one of the if not the best overall laptop drive on the market today. The Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB model is close in specs and performance but the Hitachi just edges it out on sustained reads and writes, it's the drive I use myself.

If you have the money and you're interested in massive storage with somewhat higher performance in some situations/daily use, the Seagate Momentus XT is a hybrid hard drive with 4GB of "SSD" storage on it for cached data; it's not a full blown SSD, obviously, but for data that's cached, it can provide some serious boosts and responsiveness to an older system, definitely. Unfortunately, it's twice the cost of the Hitachi I mentioned above (the Hitachi is $45, the Seagate is $100):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591

They introduced a 250GB model as well, Newegg carries that for $90.

The caddy is ok for doing the transfer and then you'd also have the ability to have more storage in the laptop if needed, obviously, but the battery life would suffer dramatically with two hard drives in constant operation. If you're plugged in the majority of the time it's a non-issue but it is something to take into consideration. I rarely take my D830 most anywhere and when I do I make sure to find an AC socket someplace too, I don't really go truly "mobile" for most any reasons.

You could - with the use of the hard drive caddy - still consider getting an SSD for your system drive (where the OS and primary apps are installed) and then use the drive in the caddy for raw storage too. All sorts of possibilities there...

I don't see any flaws in your plans, just take time to consider the options, then go for it. And definitely max out that RAM. :)

One last thing: consider that the performance off the hard drive in that caddy is most likely not going to match up with what you're expecting: the expansion bay on the D620 doesn't actually use an SATA optical drive, it's an IDE port so it's limited in terms of bus bandwidth; it shouldn't make any difference in the long run as long as that expansion caddy is used for secondary storage: you're not going to get better performance from that than the native SATA controller the primary hard drive is attached to. That's your boot drive, so again an SSD would give you the best possible performance overall.

Those Corsair Force GT SSDs that were just released have insane performance from what I've read: over 500MB/s on reads and writes, and the 60GB model is supposed to be $150 retail - that's crazy fuckin' ludicrous speed for not much money in the long run. Might be something to consider for the system drive, or some other SSD.

Good luck... and definitely post some benchmarks when you get this "new" D620 up and functional... :)
Click to expand...

Thank you Joe! I am probably going to do 4gb ram and a Hitachi 7200 500gb, any recommendations on how to copy an image of my current drive on the new one (to make it my system drive). Would Norton ghost be good?
 
You can use Ghost, sure, but my personal preference is Acronis True Image. I don't know what brand of drive is in your D620 currently - it could be a Western Digital, a Seagate, a Hitachi, a Fujitsu, or even a Toshiba as I've worked on Dells of all kinds and there's never just one brand of hard drive supplier that Dell sticks with.

If you happen to have a Seagate or Western Digital drive in the laptop or if you have any external Seagate or Western Digital drives or a desktop computer with a Seagate or Western Digital drive in it, you can get a slightly stripped down version of True Image free of charge from Seagate (for Seagate products) or Western Digital (for WD products). As long as you own a drive from either company and you get the proper version of the software, and as long as the drive is attached when you install the software, you're good to go.

You can make the Recovery Media CD as well (it creates a bootable CD with True Image on it ready to go) but the issue with this is if you're pulling the optical drive out of the laptop and putting in a second hard drive, well... unless you have an external USB optical drive to boot the Recovery Media CD from, you're gonna be stuck for a solution. :)

You can run the Windows-based version of True Image you installed (if you have the Seagate/Western Digital thing, of course) and then choose to image the source hard drive to the target drive - it'll reboot the PC into a DOS-like mode and do the cloning, or you can image it in real-time since True Image is capable of doing that as well. My recommendation is doing it from the DOS-like mode so there's no potential for a Windows glitch to bring everything crashing down.

Or Ghost, or Clonezilla, or DriveImage XML, or any other drive cloning solution you want. Shouldn't be a problem in the long run.
 
Thank you. I'm not sure if this is of benchmark interest at all, but I'd be happy to run whatever you're interested in seeing.

Should I run some sort of software after I clone to the new drive to check that there is no errors that could rear their ugly head somewhere down the line?
 
If you're concerned about the new drive potentially having issues, get the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test (aka DFT) and do a full scan of the drive when you get it. The DFT only works from "DOS" so you'll need to put it on a bootable CD or make a bootable USB stick and run it from that, but after a full test with DFT you'll know for sure if the drive is 100% ready to roll or not. I don't expect you to have any issues, but... if you're concerned, then do the testing before the cloning to ensure the drive is actually error free.

Don't trust S.M.A.R.T. status - in my experience it's meaningless overall (and I have a shoebox full of drives with excellent S.M.A.R.T. status but they're all useless for any purposes) - use the Hitachi DFT because that's what Hitachi designed it for: testing their hard drives as thoroughly as deemed necessary.

You can put the Hitachi drive into the D620, do all the testing natively that way (in place of your original current source hard drive) and when you get the "all ok" results, swap 'em back out or whatever. Better safe than sorry I suppose, but the DFT will take some time to do the full diagnostic, could be 45 minutes or even longer so, be prepped to let it finish - don't trust just the Quick/Short test, do both actually (Short test is like 5 minutes, the Advanced/Thorough one will take a lot longer since it checks every single sector on the platter surfaces for problems).

As far as benchmarks, maybe just an HDTune standard benchmark would be cool just to see the results, nothing fancy. I already know what the D620 can do for the most part, but that Hitachi 7K500 will definitely make a difference. When you get the 4GB in there, consider also setting up a small RAMdisk, say 256 to 512MB if you're so inclined. Point all your temp/tmp system variables to the RAMdisk, your browser caches, anything of a temporary nature and that'll give you a nice boost to in system responsiveness, especially when installing apps/software (which rely heavily on temp/tmp variables).
 
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