A few SSD's...

[mullet_man]

We've got a LOT of slow netbooks and laptops which only 2GB so am hoping to give SSDs a test to give these things a new lease of life.

 

What price and make should one look be looking for? I would say a 120GB would be enough space as our image is pretty small.

 

Thanks.

[mrbios]

I have a box of 70 or so sat on my desk at the moment ready to be deployed in to two IT suites another 45 to buy in the new budget, then the school will be 100% SSD

[mikeyd101]

Lucky people, Last week I just rescued a PO for 10 new machines with spinning HDD (as department ordering asked me to look over the specs), as Tech Coordinator (person that got the original quote) doesn't know or care about such things .

 

I mentioned it to TC that would be a cheap upgrade for all our aging machines but went unnoticed.

 

 

Icebergs ahead.

[3s-gtech]

We've got a LOT of slow netbooks and laptops which only 2GB so am hoping to give SSDs a test to give these things a new lease of life.

 

What price and make should one look be looking for? I would say a 120GB would be enough space as our image is pretty small.

 

Thanks.

 

Depends on the lifespan. Your netbooks will probably be SATA 2 (or even 1 if they're based on very early Atoms!) so even the hobbled Kingston V300 will be more than up to the task. If you would be doing this short term, then putting the drives in something else, get something better like a Samsung 850 Evo or equivalent. IMO.

[pete]

120gb is the perfect size too, 240 is too much and 60 just isn't enough.

 

How did you escape the Capital Wasteland and what made you give up radio?

[mullet_man]

Depends on the lifespan. Your netbooks will probably be SATA 2 (or even 1 if they're based on very early Atoms!) so even the hobbled Kingston V300 will be more than up to the task. If you would be doing this short term, then putting the drives in something else, get something better like a Samsung 850 Evo or equivalent. IMO.

 

Hi 3s-gtech.

 

Thanks for this, looking at the model they might just be SATA 1. They are Toshiba NB500s. It would possibly be a short term thing to extend the life of the devices as we have lots of these and a lot of Dell 5520s. Am going to order a couple and do some testing.

 

Thanks.

[3s-gtech]

Looks like the NB500 may have the ICH7-M / 82801 controller. This was a relative of the desktop ICH7 but it had SATA 2 support disabled, only runs at SATA 1 speeds. I have fitted a few laptops with this southbridge with SSDs and they've been massively improved, so it is worth it. Very long in the tooth now though.

[Norphy]

Fitting an SSD to a SATA 1 southbridge is certainly worth it. The transfer speeds may be limited to 150MB/s but for the majority of disk transactions, this is pretty irrelevant as the size of the files being accessed is usually pretty small.

 

What makes the SSD faster is the access time of an SSD. A modern 7200RPM hard drive will have a sustained transfer rate of around 150-200MB/sec but access times of 9-12ms. Access times on SSDs is usually a tenth of a millisecond, maybe less so it finds its files so much more quickly.

[mullet_man]

Thanks 3s-gtech and Norphy.

 

Checked my image and it's only about 32gb in size so a 120gb is plenty of room.

[adamholt1]

How much are these coming in at for you? Looking at doing a similar project?

[zag]

Welcome to 2012

[mullet_man]

How much are these coming in at for you? Looking at doing a similar project?

 

I've been looking at Misco at the minute but they are ranging at between £40 and £55 quid it looks like based on model as mentioned by 3s-gtech the Kingston V300 is 30 quid ex VAT. Whereas the Samsung model which is more recommended is 45 quid ex vat.

 

Am sure if i bought a job lot I could get the price down a few quid on each one. Might test the Kingston one first as at the minute it's only a test.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Welcome to 2012

 

Haha better late than never

[3s-gtech]

You can't moan at £30. The Kingston is okay, pretty reliable and fast enough considering they switched out the internals for slower ones after the first batch.

[mullet_man]

We ordered 2 of the cheap Kingstons just to test they came next day so we gave them ago yesterday.

 

The Toshiba netbook honestly didn't make much difference they are only seemed speedier on boot up even then it wasn't by much.

 

The Dell laptops were much better and really quick.

[mrbios]

We ordered 2 of the cheap Kingstons just to test they came next day so we gave them ago yesterday.

 

The Toshiba netbook honestly didn't make much difference they are only seemed speedier on boot up even then it wasn't by much.

 

The Dell laptops were much better and really quick.

 

How much ram did the toshiba have?

 

I've found that so long as the CPU is better than an old celeron and you have 4GB ram in everything an SSD shows massive gains. If you have celerons or less than 4GB ram though then an SSD is a bit like polishing a turd.

[mullet_man]

They have 2GB and an Atom processor. They were bought before my time but we've got hundreds of the bloody things. They are awful I just thought it might give them a bit of a boost that's all.

[3s-gtech]

Lowest model I've tested an SSD in is a Dell Inspiron 6400 from 2006, which was upgraded to a Core 2 Duo T5600 and 4GB of RAM. Transformed an antique into a perfectly useable laptop that is still going now. Not tried them in any netbooks myself.

[davethetekkie]

I did some benchmarking of our older gear to establish what would be worth the upgrade and what wouldn't. Our Toshiba NB510s showed a slight improvement but with a little bit of a test drive it became apparent that the test unit was still just too sluggish to make any investment worthwhile. Our 2nd and 3rd gen i5 machines (Viglen Genies and Lenovo M72e Tinies) showed a VAST improvement over their spinning rust though... The drive used was a 120GB Kingston V300 (current stock so I guess it's the hobbled version).

[mullet_man]

I did some benchmarking of our older gear to establish what would be worth the upgrade and what wouldn't. Our Toshiba NB510s showed a slight improvement but with a little bit of a test drive it became apparent that the test unit was still just too sluggish to make any investment worthwhile. Our 2nd and 3rd gen i5 machines (Viglen Genies and Lenovo M72e Tinies) showed a VAST improvement over their spinning rust though... The drive used was a 120GB Kingston V300 (current stock so I guess it's the hobbled version).

 

Yes it that's exactly what am thinking with our NB500s we also have about 60 NB510s too. The investment just isn't worth it which is a bit disappointing but I at least know it can work for the Dells we have.

 

Any new devices we purchase I'll make sure come with SSDs now. Thanks for everyone's help and advice.

[markwilfan]

What really grinds my gears is PC manufacturers STILL are not offering SSDs as an affordable HD swap. I mean you can pick up a Samsung EVO 850 for about £55 ex VAT and even less if bought in bulk. Why the hell would anybody want a clunky slow 500GB or 1TB drive in a workstation? grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

 

We are investing in SSDs for older PCs with the intention of just swapping the SSDs out as we refresh the hardware.

[Norphy]

Why the hell would anybody want a clunky slow 500GB or 1TB drive in a workstation? grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

 

Because the average idiot sees a PC World advert on the telly which says "£2 3s 6d for a Intel Core i7 Laptop with 8GB RAM and 2TB Hard Drive" (They of course don't mention that it has the worst possible screen, a touchpad which makes you want to through it out of a window and build quality that will make it fall apart if you do so much as belch in the same building). If they see "120GB SSD" instead, they're going think "Hmm, smaller number, not gonna buy that".

 

This is why we can't have nice things.

[markwilfan]

Fully agree with what you say there @Norphy . Even the business section of the dell site doesn't give you a standard option for ssd

[sonofsanta]

What really grinds my gears is PC manufacturers STILL are not offering SSDs as an affordable HD swap. I mean you can pick up a Samsung EVO 850 for about £55 ex VAT and even less if bought in bulk. Why the hell would anybody want a clunky slow 500GB or 1TB drive in a workstation? grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

 

We are investing in SSDs for older PCs with the intention of just swapping the SSDs out as we refresh the hardware.

 

This is why you get Novatech, Stone or VeryPC to build your PCs for you they've been giving us SSDs in new builds since 2012.

 

It frustrates the bejesus out of me in consumer kit though. 95% of people don't need more than 256GB in their laptop and so they would benefit massively from an SSD. It's a world of difference on a modern Core i3 M with enough 4GB+ of RAM.

[Arthur]

Even the business section of the Dell site doesn't give you a standard option for SSD

All of the Dell OptiPlex and Latitudes I looked at did.

 

http://i.cubeupload.com/FBAbRL.png

 

http://i.cubeupload.com/VCLnYv.png

[cpjitservices]

What about SSHD's are they worth a punt ?