SSD for laptop - Gateway NV79

[aoommen]

Hi All,

I have a Gateway NV79 laptop and my HDD recently crashed but I got it replaced for free through Best Buy extended warranty! I have a feeling they switched me from a 7200 RPM to a 5400 RPM drive - this Seagate is what I have now. Don't know what drive was in there before this, is there a way to find out!

The response time for everything to load seems a lot more after the new drive was installed! I found out that there is an extra slot, and I plan on using that for an SSD as a boot drive, should I be shopping for a SATA II or SATA III SSD for that? It is highly unlikely that this machine has a 6 Gb/s SATA connector but I'm just being wishful, does any one know for sure! Would not want to spend extra for a SATA 3 drive if I'm only going to get 3 Gb/s!

Tried asking that ACER support (they own Gateway now) guy and he was unable to help me as my laptop is out of warranty, which is a joke, but well I'm in a hurry for all that BS, so thought I'd ask here first!

Thanks in advance!

 

[k1114]

The hdd in it before was 5400rpm. Your laptop has hm55 chipset so you most likely have sata 2 but would still look at sata 3 ssds as the prices between them isn't much of a difference. All sata is backwards compatible. You'd probably want ~60gb for a boot drive and the crucial m4 would be my suggestion.

 

[geofelt]

A SSD in your laptop will absolutely transform it.
Do not worry about sata2 vs. 3. It only makes a difference in synthetic benchmarks at very high i/o rates and queue depths. Not what we do much of.

Any modern ssd will be a 50x performance over a hard drive in small random i/o, and that is what the os does mostly. 2-3x sequential will not be bad either.

From a reliability point of view, I would look for Intel, Samsung, or crucial, in that order.

 

[CaedenV]

wow, Sammys are getting all the love all the sudden, but I agree with the order of 'good' SSDs to get. Do not be afraid of OCZ though. While not as stellar as the others mentioned they offer a great bang for the buck... just make sure it has the most recent firmware (most of them will) otherwise you are bound to have issues.
I am running a SATA3 SSD on my wife's SATA2 PC and have had no problems. And the sata 3 drives tend to be the same or lower price than the older drives due to manufacturing improvements. They also tend to be more mature/stable than the older drives as well, so really I would not even look at the older SATA2 drives at all.

60GB is plenty for Windows, Office, and a skad of other little programs that you need. Load large programs (like games) on the HDD, and store all of your music/media/documents/internet downloads to the HDD as well.