OCZ Vertex SSD in M11x

I'm planning to buy a OCZ Vertex 60GB (first gen Vertex) SSD for my M11xR1.

Does anyone have experience with changing the drive? Are there any tricky things I should look out for?
Any help is very much appreciated

 

60GB on a M11X is not very much storage, Win7 takes 20GB alone I think. Look at the Seagate Momentus XT 500gb, it's faster that the 7200rpm that came with your M11X, and it's 500gb for $129.00 at newegg.com or cheaper.

 

I'll be keeping my 500GB HDD as an external storage. Over here (the Netherlands) I can get the Vertex for 80 euro, compared to 115 for the XT.

I'm not going to upgrade from HDD to hybrid HDD, because I use to many programs to all benefit from the 4GB flash cache.

 

Changing the drive was no problem, make sure you have a exturnal DVD drive, or a bootable os off of a thumb drive. Win 7 will pick it up and install just like any other drive.

 

I heard the Vertex SSDs have some kind of jumper cable next to the SATA connector. I was wondering if the M11x has a connector for that one, since it's used to update the firmware

 

I am not sure about the jumper cable. I know you can update the firmware by downloading it from OCZ's website, no cables required. I just got my OCZ Vertex 2 128gb, and it had the latest firmware 1.11 already, I am sure you don't need to worry about that.

 

i have the vertex 2 60gb, and installation was simple and straightforward as any other SSD. I would assume its pretty much exactly the same for the first gen vertex. And 60GB has been plenty for me since I don't put my music on there (mp3 player always with me)

 

60 gig is plenty, i have OCZ 2 and i got 14gig left with wow/sc2/tf2/cs:s/bad company 2.

 

The only thing to look out for is to make sure that Disk Defragmentation is turned off. Never ever defragment an SSD.

Other than that, there aren't any tricks. The drive will look, act, and install just like any other SATA drive. I have an OCZ Vertex in my Dell XPS M1330, and an OCZ Agility in my Alienware M11x. Both drives installed easily, without any "tricks" or "tips" required.

 

Btw, i also need an SSD for my incoming M11x, about 80~100GB in capacity, which 1 have a decent speed that should i get?
Thanks

 

Depends what your goal is for the SSD. For battery life and lowest cost, the best controllers are from Samsung, Indilinx and Toshiba.

 

Thank you! Oh i thought SSD = better battery life already and there are not much diff between them? Well i want a decent performance, atleast as good as my 80GB Intel SSD. Gonna play WoWs alot on it so, wat SSD is the best for gaming? Im also waiting for Intel G3, sadly it wont come anytime soon

 

I have a vertex 1 60GB in my desktop and its fantastic! Boots into usable windows in about 15/20sec's.

The vertex 2's are slightly quicker so I’d recommend going for one of those.

When I eventually get my m11x i’ll be putting a vertex 2 200GB in there. Will it make much of a difference to battery life when not using turbo boost or the 335m?

 

OCZ Vertex 2 120GB for $240 from NewEgg.

All of the research you will do on speed, reliability, firmware support, price, etc will lead you to the conclusion that the OCZ Vertex 2 120GB is the drive to get in your price range. So you can save yourself several hours of work, and just get that one.

 

If you want the best battery life, the best controller is going to be the SandForce controller, which can be found in several SSD's (including the OCZ Vertex 2). Sandforce also has the added benefit of being the fastest SSD controller out right now.

A SandForce controller uses around 1.0W at peak, while the previous performance champs (Indilinx and Intel) used around 2.0W - 2.5W at peak. For comparison, a 2.5" 7200rpm mechanical hard drive uses around 2.5W - 3.0W at peak.

 

Here is a good guide on working with SSD and getting windows 7 installs down to 5gb so you have more space for games, apps, and media

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m15x/516410-windows-7-optimized-ssd-install-5-5gb.html

 

Awesome, that's all i need! Thanks so much, +rep

 

What a great link! Thanks!

 

I new OCZ firmware 1.24 is out, how can I install it? I need to run windows off a usb or DVD, how do I do this?

 

I just got my 120gb vertex 2. Amazing drive. Every just appears, doesnt have to load. I think the newest firmware is 1.28 for the vertx/agility 2 series, i just connected mine to my desktop and flashed it from there since it wont let you use ocz toolbox when the drive is your primary drive.

 

@bavman

I urge you to get some tools to benchmark your drive, OCZ recommends tools to use. I have the same drive in my R1; there are about a dozen things that all impact the performance of the drive, but more importantly will help you maintain it. One important item is to turn off superfetch/prefetch/, especially disk defrag needs to be off, never defrag the drive. Another key item is that the more you put on the disk the slower it will get; in a direct question to OCZ they recommended installing no more than 60% of the capacity of the drive. Check out the SSD thread, and read it thoroughly, there is a LOT of information there.

 

I've done that already, and ive ran some benches for iops and test some read speeds. Havent really tested write speeds too much cause i dont want the trim algorithms and that stuff to kick in yet and slow it down. Ive gotten between 200-250 read on most of the tools ive used as well as 30k iops 4k 64thrd, so im pretty darn happy with it right now.

 

hey im looking into tihs ssd, Newegg.ca - A-DATA S599 AS599S-64GM-C 2.5" 64GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

would this work?/give good speeds?

 

DO NOT BUY ADATA SSDS. Trust me. They'll shut down on you when you leave the PC for a few hours, and won't turn back on until you power them back on. Spend the extra few bucks to go for a better name-brand SandForce SSD that has regular firmware updates.

(Oh, also, that drive is actually only 60GB unformatted, less than even that formatted. Hilarious, huh?)

 

^ Agree 100%.

The first thing I noticed was the relatively low review score that AData drive has received (3/5 stars of 90+ reviews). The negative comments all state that the performance is unreliable and unstable.

Definitely get a name-brand drive with a good reputation. There is a very good reason why people who buy SSD's consistently buy drives from OCZ, Corsair, Crucial, and Intel.

 

I'm a vertex 1st gen 120GB user, and simply love it.
Great performance compared to Seagate momentus, and offcourse the SILENCE. I can now "throw" the laptop on the couch/bed in stead of gently putting it down

 

You can actually load a CD/DVD on to an external hard drive and boot from that, completely negating the need for an external optical drive. The only time I used to use optical drives was my OS install, and ever since I put Win7 Ult x64 on one of my externals, have used that since.