Upgrade Your HDD to SSD: How and Why Discussion

The slowest part of a PC is typically the hard disk drive (HDD). Find out why upgrading your laptop to a Solid State Drive (SSD) is beneficial and sensible.

Read the full content of this Article: Upgrade Your HDD to SSD: How and Why

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Most SSDs shorten battery life by about 20 minutes I've noticed... are there any SSDs that are extremely energy efficient? I remember when SSDs first were coming out on the mainstream market and one of the promises was strides in battery life.

 

SSD shortening battery life? That's news to me. I swapped out my MacBook Pro's stock 750GB Toshiba hard drive for a 128GB Samsung 830 Series SSD and my battery life jumped from 3 to 4 hours to between 6 and 8.

 

It depends on the SSD - some controllers/memory configurations are [much] more power hungry than others. Generally battery life should be better with an SSD though, the idle power consumption is almost nothing (again, generally).

 

Agreed that probably depends on SSD drive but assuming there's no constant read/write activity on SSD it should add a good few minutes to the battery time.
In my case it's something like 40 minutes easily- possibly more but it's hard to be consistent with real life testing.

Like Datamonger I've replaced a HDD (Hitachi 500GB 5400rpm) with Samsung SSD830 256GB.

 

For those worried about power consumption, probably the best set of comparative power consumption measurements is at Tom's Hardware. I glad to see that my Crucial m$ is at the right end of this chart. However, at maximum read/write speeds an SSD may use more power than an HDD, but the data is moving several times faster. My own experience over several years is that SSDs reduce overall power consumption.

I'm still wondering why none of the drive manufacturers have produced a SSD/ HDD combo drive with 128GB or 256GB of SSD and a single 500GB platter. If a 5mm thick 500GB HDD is feasible then a 7mm thick combo drive should not be a challenge.

John

 

There is a great app for SSD compression here:

Simon King`s MagicRAR: Drive Press 2.0

I have two Intel 600 GB SSD's (558 GB usable capacity), and I have maxed them out with this utility. On my source code disk, I have 650 GB actual usage, with 100 GB more free space. On my games disk, I have 550 GB actual usage, with still 100 GB more free space.

Both drives converted to fully compressed in mere hours - the utility can use up to double the CPU cores in your system (including the hyper-threaded ones) for maximum conversion speed. My CPU/SSDs got saturated at about 12 threads max - my bus is SATA II, so your results with a SATA III drive may actually be better.

I give it my five star vote - the URL above shows how much better than Windows this compresses - its really quite remarkable Windows itself cannot do this!

 

I'd buy one of those.