Laptop HDD Upgrade SSD

[santoshnavale]

Hi All,

I own a Dell Vostro 1700. Its been good 2 years. Now I plan to upgrade the mechanical HDD to a SSD Intel X-25-M 80GB. I will be trading a 120GB drive for a super cool 80GB SSD. Not really a step down I guess. What should I take care before I make this purchase. As it is a 2.5" drive I am hoping it will slip in. Will I need any adapters. Also OS choice. I read that I will require TRIM enabled OS. What is this. I mostly use linux so does anyone see a problem.

Thanks
Santosh

 

[N.Broekhuijsen]

it should all just work fine, i just dont see why you would need an SSD drive. you are using linux, which is already quite low footprint. (i use ubuntu).

 

[santoshnavale]

it should all just work fine, i just dont see why you would need an SSD drive. you are using linux, which is already quite low footprint. (i use ubuntu).

What do you mean by low foot print? I too use ubuntu, sorry for not mentioning that. I read that ubuntu is missing TRIM support. So is it advisable to go for a SSD?

 

[N.Broekhuijsen]

well honestly i dont believe youll get much of a performance improvement by getting an SSD if your using ubuntu. mechanical hard drives are plenty fast for a low footprint OS

low foot print = needs little resources to run, little hardware. Ubuntu when idling from startup uses less than 250 mb ram, windows 7 uses more than 1.2gb. does that make sense?

I dont have much experience with SSD drives, but I dont believe TRIM is essential.

http/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

it says that TRIM has been integrated into linux 2.6.33, so that or anything above and your fine.

TRIM is thus a useful boost to keep speeds of SSD drives up.

It appears that your system will fully support a SSD drive, but i still do not see why you would be interested in using an SSD drive. the marginal more performance you get vs the amount of money you pay is not yet worth it. I would let SSD drives mature a bit more before you consider this.

If your an enthusiast user I could understand that you are interested in an SSD, but for things you do on a laptop it seems rather pointless.

that any help?

and sorry but I do not like seeing people spend money on VERY unnecessary things.

 

[santoshnavale]

Hi xbeater,

I totally agree with you about the performance impreovements and VFM (value for money). I am actually getting it as a gift. I did not know what to get and I chose a SSD.

I actually dual boot (Ubuntu + XP). I now have been doing some reading on Win XP support for TRIM. From what I read, only Win 7 has support for TRIM.

Does anyone have SSD with XP boot?

Santosh

 

[N.Broekhuijsen]

as is said, TRIM is not essential, it just gives a nice useful performance boost. (and SSDs are already plenty fast).

Honestly though, windows 7 is not too bad, if your lappy can run it I would seriously consider it. Hey I stopped dual booting XP and Ubuntu and used only Win7 because I was so impressed by it.

 

[santoshnavale]

Hi xbeater,

I too shifted from XP + linux dual boot to Win 7. Win 7 worked like a charm. No issues at all. It was all smooth sailing till i wanted to play archaic games. Due to some reason I want able to play them whereas my friends who had XP were able to. So I had to revert back to XP + linux.

as is said, TRIM is not essential, it just gives a nice useful performance boost. (and SSDs are already plenty fast).

According to anandtech it keeps the drive healthy and performing at its out-of-the box performance longer than when TRIM is not enabled. SSD are definitely faster but when I can extract a little more by ensuring TRIM support, I say why not.

From the reading I have done, Intel SSD tool box kit adds TRIM functionality but it also says its manual feature. I do not know what it means. Maybe I need to schedule this process regularly.

Could anyone point me to plain english partition alignment guides that do not need 2 computers or 2 hard disks, Linux live CD boot for example.

Thanks xbeater for taking out time to respond. I appreciate the help.

Thanks and Regards
Santosh

 

[N.Broekhuijsen]

I do have to confess to something: I have no experience with SSD drives, this is all me googling stuff up.

you could do something complicated with the intel tools and all, but maybe it is an idea if you create a virtual machine inside your windows 7 installation, in which you run XP. Other option: try seeing if you set the games to compatibility mode, if then they will run in Win7. (you could also create a linux machine with xp virtual machine)

for making a virtual machine I reccomend you use VirtualBox. It is a nice very well performing virtual machine client from Sun. (creators of JAVA)

im just trying to lay out all the options you have, so you can choose what suits you best.

Im not that great a fan of dual boot anymore, and with the seamless integration of the virtual machine and the host with VirtualBox it is very attractive to use that option, simply because you can run both machines at the SAME TIME!!! --thumbs up----

anyways good luck with the project!

 

[santoshnavale]

Best answer selected by santoshnavale.