Question about upgrading HD.

Hey guys, I have a M11X R1, I have with it the lame 240gb hdd, I was considering a ssd, but I need a lot of space for my projects, also it's way too expensive, so after reading several reviews, I decided to get the Samsung Momentus Hybrid XT with 500gb.

I want to know that if I manage to make a full copy of my old hdd to this new hdd, if it will work alright when I plugin the new hdd, or do I have to make a clean install, because I don`t want to reinstall everything, unless I need to.

 

Some here may say to do a clean install, but my R2 works fine with a ghosted
image (Acronis Migrate Easy) of the original. That said, if I didn't have a
ton of stuff already loaded onto the HDD, I would have PREFERRED to do a
clean install.

But like you, wanted to save the time and hassle of reinstalling apps! You
can always do the clean method if you run into troubles later.

 

If you use a drive imaging program like Acronis True Image, you will be able to directly swap the hard drives without making any additional changes or reinstalling any software.

Swapping hard drives and using a drive imaging tool has been a very popular thing among Notebook Review forum members.

 

Cloning/ghosting is the way to go if you are happy with how everything is running right now. A clean install is the ultimate but is labour insensive.

I described how I swapped my HD here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/531755-alienware-m11x-replacing-harddisk-2.html

Keep reading into the thread for more advice and opinions.

Cheers,
Stain

 

Get a portable external hard drive to store your project files on and get a SSD.

 

Yeah, that really depends on an individual's needs. A major point of getting an M11x is to have it be ultra portable. I don't think you want to whip out an external drive every time you want to do some work. Plus you don't want to be carrying an external drive and cable around everywhere you go in my opinion.

I cannot argue with the blazing speed of a SSD drive. My desktop has one and they are screaming fast. Of course the external drive would be even slower than an internal SATA (non SSD) drive. So you would have slower access times to do your work. It is a big trade off, but each individaul's needs will dictate what works best for them. Are you storing your project files or regularly accessing your project files, you know?

Stain

 

Yeah, it's totally worth buying an overpriced SSD and sacrificing portability just so he can save 1 minute of loading time every day

 

Yeah, SSD's are crazy expensive. Get a 16gb or 32gb thumbdrive and you can take most of your files with you.

 

The benefit of an SSD isn't load times. Any drive, mechanical or SSD, can load a single application or boot an OS relatively quickly.

The benefit of an SSD is its ability to massively multitask, and never choke down. This is measured by IOPS. A fast mechanical 2.5" 7200rpm drive can handle about 500 - 600 IOPS. A fast SandForce-based SSD can handle 35,000 - 40,000... almost two entire orders of magnitude larger.

The result is that a system with an SSD will feel snappier and smoother, no matter what is going on with the hard drive. Check out this video I made. My laptop boots into Windows 7 from POST, and loads 27 applications on startup in about 1 minute. A mechanical hard drive would barely be past the login screen. This is an extreme example of IOPS.
YouTube - Why I love my SSD - Windows 7 boot + loading 27 applications in about 1 minute.

A practical example of when this is useful: You're installing an application on your laptop. Anything else you do with your laptop, like load a browser and surf the web, will feel slower because your drive is already maxing out its IOPS from the application install.

The only people who say that SSD's aren't worth it are people who don't have one. Anyone who has ever owned an SSD will swear by them, and never go back to mechanical.

 

No... just, no. I already pointed out all the errors in your post the last time you tried to make that argument:

Again, no... Loading the browser is not a random read/write operation, nor is installing a program.

The only people who say SSDs are worth it are the ones who feel the need to justify their purchase.

See how easy it is to make baseless accusations?

 

You are correct that there is a difference between random and sequential IOPS. When IOPS is stated as a single number, it is Total IOPS across all tests (random + sequential). Each drive testing suite (e.g. IOMeter, ATTO, etc) has its own pattern of random + sequential read/write patterns, which determine the total IOPS measurement for a drive under that testing suite.

In sequential read/write patterns, an SSD can, at best, be in the low single digits faster than an SSD (about 2x - 4x faster). Where an SSD makes a difference is the random reads. An SSD absolutely DOMINATES mechanical hard drives by a factor of close to 100x faster, due largely to the incredibly low seek times of an SSD.

The other significant factor to the multitasking performance of an SSD's behavior to NCQ. With a mechanical hard drive, the storage controller is typically waiting on the physics of a hard drive to physically move a head to a physical location on a metal platter. With an SSD, it is not uncommon on the drive to be waiting on the storage controller or CPU for its next request. That is why SSD's scale so much better with higher NCQ depths than mechanical hard drives.

Technically, you are correct about how random IOPS makes a bigger difference than total IOPS (which is random IOPS + sequential IOPS). But I claim that total IOPS (which is shortened to just IOPS) is a more useful number to know.

First of all, there really isn't too much of a difference between sequential IOPS of an SSD or mechanical hard drive... it is the random IOPS that makes the difference. So if you're comparing the IOPS of a mechanical hard drive to an SSD, you can attribute the difference almost entirely to the difference in random IOPS. Second, you will be hard pressed to find benchmarks online that have separate measurements random IOPS and sequential IOPS. If all you can find are measurements on total IOPS, then you already have a pretty good clue that it is random IOPS that makes the difference.

Yes, you are correct. I think we can both agree that sequential read/write times are only marginally useful for general purpose computer use. Most of what people do with their computers day-to-day is going to hit random read/writes much harder than sequential.

That is correct. That is why I specifically named the SandForce controller in my post. Anyone who buys an SSD today will realistically get a drive based on a SandForce controller, which has excellent performance across the board.

Nobody is realistically going to get an SSD based on a crap controller, like a 1st gen JMicron.

Yes, but even an un-TRIMmed drive will perform better in the most common usage patterns (random read/writes) than a mechanical hard drive. And again - I specifically mentioned the very popular SandForce controller, which does support TRIM.

Installing a game like Left 4 Dead 2 takes an ~6.5GB archive and unpacks it into 42,500 files that take up 10.5GB on disk. Installing Civilization 5 takes an ~2.8GB archive and unpacks it into 4,400 files that take up 4.54GB. Most of those files are very small, random write operations.

Opening a browser and browsing around on the internet hits the browser cache like crazy. You can visit a website that has dozens or hundreds of images on just the home page, each being saved as small .JPG files that are only a new KB in size. If you visited that page before, you read that cache of small files from disk. If it's the first time you visited that page, you're writing a new cache to disk.

Those are all random read or write operations that would force a mechanical hard drive to do a seek. That seek is two orders of magnitude faster (app. 100x) on an SSD than a mechanical hard drive.

If you believe my claim to be baseless, then I challenge you to find 5 examples, anywhere on the internet from any site or forum, where someone regrets buying an SSD.

 

I'm interested in the Acronis solution a few people have mentioned. How's that work? Does it back up to an external USB drive and build a bootable USB key that you can then use to restore from the external USB drive? Did I just answer my own question?

 

I can introduce you to a wife, a bank manager and an accountant that would throw a fit if I slapped down a grand on a 500gig ssd if that helps. Just saying

 

No the easiest way is to get a SATA to USB adapter and plug your new hard drive in VIA the USB port then boot to a bootable cloning software and run the disk copy then when done swap the new hard drive in.

 

You could do it that way but it would be easier to use a usb to sata adapter and build the image on the new disk as the other poster said.

You can also backup and restore from network media or dvd's, but given that most people aren't running a backup server and our computers don't have dvd rom drives...

I haven't used Acronis but I've heard nothing but good things about it, and they have a free demo. At work we primarily use ghost for imaging, but it's predominantly enterprise and way out of the consumer price range. They have a consumer version too, but it's more expensive than Acronis. PING is linux if you're in to that, it's also free, but it looks like it requires boot media.

 

Great! Thanks for the tips guys.

 

I agree. Nobody in their right mind would spend $1,000 on an SSD.

But in all fairness, froogle (aptly named, BTW) used an extreme example. People don't buy 500GB $1,000 SSD's. They buy 60GB $120 SSDs, or 120GB $200 SSD's. You still pay a high premium for the SSD, but you get a much better return on your money with lower capacity SSD's

 

I had a desktop computer and put the old and new 2.5" M11X hard drives in it (obviously not as the boot drive) and ran Acronis on them from there. I did that to ensure none of the files that needed to be copied over were in use. Although any of the above methods accomplish this as well.

I can tell you what did not work. I have a external HD docking station for my desktop that is connected by USB. It has two slots in it to connect 2 HDs to my desktop through a single USB cable.
Thermaltake BlacX Duet Dual 2.5/3.5IN SATA Hard Drive Docking Station USB 2.0 eSATA

I can put two drives in there at the same time and regularly transfer files between the 2 external drives and the desktop easily. However, Acronis would not let me clone one HD to the other when they were both connected through the same USB cable. Not sure why, it should work in theory and it recognized both drives, but it would not go for cloning.

Stain

 

I use this software for cloning hard drives and it works perfect every time
EASEUS Disk Copy: Free Disk Copy, Disk Clone, Partition Copy Software. Sector by Sector for hard drive backup freeware.
however I have never successfully cloned an rotating hard drive to an SSD it always blue screens
I also recommend western digital scorpio black hard drives they are great performers and if I wasn't using a 256GB SSD I would be using one of those and they go up to 500GB.. if I was to complain it would be that they may vibrate a bit .. GL
also just go buy a cheap 2.5 inch sata enclosures
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ..._re=2.5_sata_enclosure-_-17-366-014-_-Product
put your new drive in there and plug it in.. the above CD creates a bootable CD boot from the cd and follow the world simplest instructions and enjoy!

 

The technology is mature, but it's not being produced in the same volume as spinny disks. SSDs with the capacity of traditional hard disk drives are available, but you'll only see those in enterprise data arrays.

The closest things you'll find to the dual drive set up you're describing would be booting from a small ssd with a large hdd for files or the momentus xt which caches commonly accessed files to a 4gb flash "volume" according to on board hardware and delivers those files at higher speeds than the regular disk.

Another option I intend to test soon is putting a pcie ssd in the open slot that isn't currently occupied by a wan card. I've heard that it didn't work, but no one has any documentation.

 

First of all guys, thanks for all the answers, I read them all, my original doubt about if an Image of the old disc would work on a new one, has been answered, yes it would.

Now, after that long discussion, I find myself wondering if maybe I should break the bank, and buy a SSD after all, it all comes down to money, I have to say, even tho I never owned a SSD, the Name User makes a good point that maybe in the cost/benefit analysis, it's not worth it, but I don't think any of us bought a M11x because of cost/benefit, we bought it, because we wanted power, performance in a small package.

I already have an external hard drive and a 32gb pico-c flash drive, but like Stain said, the main reason I got rid of my old notebook and got this little beast is because of the ultra-portability, so I rarely use the external hdd, I even bought on ebay an internal express card dell 5520 3g modem, so I didn't have to keep pluggin the usb 3g modem, I sacrificed the 802.11n wifi for that, now I can only use 802.11b and g connections, quite a small sacrifice, comparing to hdd space.

My main use of the M11x is for work, I`m a webdeveloper, I work mainly with C#.Net projects, but ocasionally I enjoy some gaming, World of Warcraft alone takes about 22gb of space, most of the other new games, also takes a ton of space, which makes me worried, a 512gb ssd is completelly out of my reality, it'd cost nearly as much as the note costed, but a 256gb ssd, I'm considering, it'd cost me at least US$500(I live in brazil), but I think it'd be worth it, but I need to make the math to see if I could squeeze that on my budget.

Thx for all the input, specially to Kent, Stain and Name User, you all made good points that I will take into consideration,

 

Next month I'm going to do some experimenting with pcie ssds. To my knowledge no one has actually tried installing one in the m11x. I have a couple of devices in mind:
A card made for the dell mini
A generic card with a sandforce controller (more speed)
and a samsung card (if i can find it) that's got sata support

These cards won't have enough space for your games, but an OS and productivity suite wouldn't be a problem.

 

I decided to buy a 256gb ssd da marca samsung, modelo MMDPE56G5DXP, I paid around $500, just waiting for it to arrive, then I'll test it out, to see if it's worth all the hype.