SSD upgrade for XPS M1530

Upgrading my Dell XPS M1530 HDD to SSD.

Which would you recommend from a price range: $200-$400?
1. Crucial 128 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT128M4SSD2
2. Crucial 256 GB m4 2.5-Inch SATA III CT256M4SSD
3. OCZ Technology 240 GB Agility 2 Series SATA II 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive
4. Intel 320 Series 160 GB SATA 3.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive

Any other recommendations?

 

Any of those except the OCZ. Avoid those Sandforce drives until Sandforce learns to fix problems. The Crucial M4 comes highly recommended by myself and quite a number of other people on these forums. The Intel 320 is a good drive, though there is an issue yet to be resolved. Note however that your 1530 is only a SATA 2 laptop, so it won't take full advantage of the speed of the M4, but it will still be terrific.

The C300 may also be worth consideration, though it tends to be a bit more expensive than the M4. Samsung 470 for a SATA 2 drive is hard to beat right now.

 

Crucial M4 is a pretty darned good drive. I would definitely get that, in whatever capacity you can afford. If your budget truly is closer to the $400 mark, then get the 256GB drive. If you can only comfortably spend closer to $200, then get the 128GB capacity.

Yes, the Crucial M4 is a SATA3-capable (6Gbps) drive, while your laptop is only SATA2-capable (3Gbps). But that really doesn't matter. The increase in maximum bandwidth between SATA2 --> SATA3 only affects Sequential Read patterns. Most of your real-world usage (about 95%) will actually be hitting your storage device with Random Read patterns. So in real-world usage, the difference between SATA2 and SATA3 doesn't really matter.

A high-performance high-capacity SSD like the Crucial M4 256GB has the benefit of being future-proof. You will be able to use it in your current machine today, and get great results. And you will be able to carry it forward into whatever laptop / desktop you use in the future, when you retire your current Dell XPS M1530.


P.S. Definitely avoid the OCZ Agility 2 drive. It is a previous-generation drive, using slower flash memory than OCZ's mainstream performance part (the OCZ Vertex series). If someone gave me an OCZ Agility 2, I still wouldn't use it.

 

I wasn't aware of that! Crucial it is, thanks!

I originally had a Hitachi 320GB 5400 RPM. Upgraded a year ago to the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid 500GB, but it died on me last week (Should have got the WD Scorpio Black). Right now I'm back using original Hitachi (which BLOWS). Decided I want to make the jump to SSD and I don't want to buy a new laptop right now, still happy with the XPS.

Does anyone know if its possible to make a Windows 7 backup image or Acronis and recover it on a new SSD? From what I understand it's better to put a fresh copy and install of everything on a SSD and you can't do an image restore from a larger to smaller drive.

Can someone confirm this?

 

You can indeed use a drive imaging tool to move from a larger HDD partition --> smaller SSD partition, as long as the destination SSD has enough capacity to store the amount of data you are trying to move over.

But I wold recommend you do a fresh install of Windows 7 anyway, for two reasons:

1) Windows 7 will automatically detect your SSD, and configure itself to use your SSD (e.g. disabling Disk Defragmenter, etc). You can certainly do these steps yourself manually if you choose not to do a fresh install. But having Widnows 7 do it for you during the install process is a nice advantage.

2) You get to play with your fast new hardware. The computer nerd in me loves getting fast new computer hardware, and watching how much faster Windows installs compared to what I was using before. I actually enjoy re-installing Windows for that reason.

 

I probably will end up just re-installing everything once I get the SSD. Just sucks because I just finished having to re-install everything on my Hitachi HDD, for some reason I couldn't restore from my Windows backup image.

Before my 500GB Seagate went I had made several images, including one with just OS, drivers and programs installed. I needed to use my old 320GB Hitachi because it's all I have right now but it wouldn't restore from any of the Windows backup images (Error 0x80042412). Googled it and noticed people saying you can't restore Windows system images going from a larger to smaller HDD (which I never knew before) even if the backed up data is smaller than the HDD itself. ‎Searching further, some people seem to say that Acronis True Image Home 11 works though. If this is true, I may want to invest in this.

Does anyone know the answer to this?

 

I've gotten it to work before.

But even if it doesn't, you can use a partition re-sizing tool to just resize the partition to something that will fit onto your SSD, and then drive-image that.

 

Did you get it to work with Windows System Image or Acronis?

I tried shrinking the volume in Windows Disk Management but the most it will go down to is about 160GB for some reason, and there only about 30GB worth of data on the HDD. Which re-sizing tool would you recommend?

 

I've used Acronis TrueImage and Clonezilla (free) before. I haven't used Windows System Image before.

And I do not believe you can shrink / resize existing partitions in Windows Disk Management. I would check out a tool like G-Parted (also free) instead.

 

Sorry for bumping an old topic but I'm in the market for my old and trusty M1530 as well. I will probably get the smallest capacity just for the OS and programs.

So, is Crucial still the brand to go for or will the OCZ Agility 3 60GB will do?

Thanks in advance guys.

 

forget 60gb sandforce2 drives with asynchronous memory, they're rubbish. Just get m4 and enjoy it, it moght not be fastest sequential writer out there, but it's more than enough (faster than most notebook hdd's anyway)

 

Thank you for your help ivan_cro. One last thing, is there a performance difference between SSDs of varying sizes? I believe this is the case with traditional magnetic-platter HDDs where bigger disks tend to outperform smaller ones.

 

in fact, today smaller capacity mechanical disks tend to outperform larger ones at least in desktop arena, for example, 500gb last gen seagate disk is using 1tb platter, and only outer half of it for ""smaller" capacity disk, and therefore performes better than those that use full platter size.

SSDs on the other hand perform better the more memory they have, up to a certain point. But generally, same ssd model with more memory is almost always faster than smaller ones.

Reason for that is they use multiple channels to which memory is connected, and smallest ones usually can't fill all channels because they use too large nand chips. Also in most cases when writing, controller is faster than nand and if you have more than one chip connected to channel you again get better performance.

For example, intel 320 40gb uses controllers 5 channels with one chip per channel, 80gb uses 10 channels with one chip per channel and 160gb uses all 10 channels but with 2 chips per channel. And if you go through theirs specs you'll notice writing difference between all of them, while read speed is already saturated by 80gb drive.