Dell Latitude D430 w/SSD VS D430 w/HDD

Wow, it's been at least 1 years since I was last here posting messages.

I recently received a Latitude D430 with a 32GB Sandisk SSD. I search on this forum and couldn't find anyone discussing this combination and thought I would share some of the benchmarks I performed. The corporation I work for is planning to migrate to using SSD for their Dell laptops.

Anyways, for starters, here are a few basic benchmark comparisons and I'll let the pictures do all the talking:

Left: 430+SSD; Right: 430+HDD


Left: D410+HDD; Right P390+HDD


FYI, despite the benchmark results, in most cases the system feels slower with SSD than with HDD...

 

it feels slower with SSD? i thought it was supposed to be faster
but wait, its dell, so i dunno about their stuff

 

I saw another thread either here or at NBF from a guy with the SSD. He loved it and said it seem almost instantaneous. I'm curious what your Corp. plans to do for extra drive space. 32GB will probably get managers by for email and Office, but what about "worker bees" that want to load up on data? USB drives?

 

HERE is that other thread I saw. It's a 1330 with SSD.

 

Results on the chart are comparable to others. SSDs are great for reads, seek time, not so good for writes. I really wanted to get one and then read current issues with these disks (for starters: http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=96), plus paying $1100 for a 64GB SSD won't happen. So, I'll wait for the next gen of SSDs next year, with 100MB/sec throughput, field tested for a year, and waaayyy more affordable while enjoying a 7200rpm 100GB drive in the meantime.

 

Yes, I saw that thread too and I think in comparison with majority of the tasks, SSD performance is better. However, I am sure there are tasks that HDDs perform better than SSD and that is currently what I am tasked to find out. Nonetheless, if the performance margin is only 10% on top of HDD but at an additional US$400 more than standard 1.8" 3200 RPM HDD (that's our corp. price), then we will wait until SSD becomes more affordable.

The majority of notebook users here use conventional HDD. Those top management who travels alot would be given SSD. BTW, I recently bought an external 2.5” Samsung 5400 RPM 160 GB SATA II 3.0 Gbps notebook HDD with a USB+eSATA 2.5" case. When connected to an eSATA PCI-Express card….the read speed was over 110,000 (110 mb/s) and the write speed was approximately 70,000 (70 mb/s). It totally smoldered ALL, even the P390’s 7200 RPM drive. Maybe that's what I will be proposing to notebook power users....

 

If your system feels slower, check out some of the tweaks below; I have found they have increased everything drastically.

I may have a solution to your problem, however. I am wondering if your system is in AHCI mode and using the Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

My before and after results are significantly improved with these.

To see if its turned on, go into you BIOS menu and search it out there. It should have AHCI selected and SATA not selected.

In addition, I found I had to play around with the specific AHCI driver that works best for my system. i realized that the wrong one was actually slowing things quite a bit, even though the HDTune tests never reflected this. For my system, the newest intel driver is out of the question but the one supplied with the M1330 drivers disk works great.

I would occeasionally get freezing which really annoyed me. This also took care of that.

Hope this helps.. My tests below.

 

THis is interesting - I purchased a D430 refurb with the 64GB SSD and while in some tasks it is faster but it is really not that noticable over a 5400rpm 120GB srive - yes boot times are faster and applications open a bit quicker - but that is it! So this computer is going back and I just ordered a 5400rpm 1.8 inch 120GB hard drive.

 

Is 32GB enough capacity for Running XP comfortably for normal non-exotic tasks?

what about so-called fre "XP-Lite" software that trims it?

 

I think it is. I have a D420 with a 30GB HDD. I'm running XP SP3 with a few apps and still have 17+GB free space. I mainly use it for surfing, email, and reading books via software. I'm surprised how easily I get by with just 30GB.

I'm not familiar with XP-lite so I can't help you with that.