Finally decided to bite the bullet and get a solid state disk which have come down in price quite a bit over the last couple of years, settling on Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB (SV30037A/120G) at ~74 euro from Amazon. The product is listed as "with adapter" which is a plastic raiser, very important for a laptop installation.
Trying it first in my ageing Dell Vostro 1520 (2010) - a SSD is probably the cheapest (and maybe final) upgrade before getting a new laptop. Here are the specs:
To the unit itself, things load noticeably faster and as a nice surprise, quieter as well - not only because the SSD is completely silent as expected, but also the laptop fan seems to kick in less often. Probably because loading things quicker it allows the CPU to spend less time at higher frequency and keep the CPU temperature lower.
Some totally empirical load timings in Windows:
The SSD drive tops at 250 MB/sec and that seems to be in line with the SATA revision 2 (300 MB/s) interface, as shown by PC Wizard 2013 below. I will install this in my desktop as well and see how it performes in there, Kingston is rating it up to 450 MB/s with SATA revision 3 (600 MB/s) interface.
Trying it first in my ageing Dell Vostro 1520 (2010) - a SSD is probably the cheapest (and maybe final) upgrade before getting a new laptop. Here are the specs:
- Dell Vostro 1520 (N0115266)
- Intel® 45 Express chipset
- Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.4 GHz, 1066 Mhz, 3 MB cache)
- 15.4” Widescreen WXGA+ CCLF, anti-glare (1440x900)
- 4 GB RAM, 800 MHz DDR2 Dual Channel
- Intel Integrated GMA 4500MHD
- Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9320423ASG (320 GB, 7200 rpm, NCQ)
vs
Kingston SSDNow V300 SV300S37A/120G (120 GB) - Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit.
To the unit itself, things load noticeably faster and as a nice surprise, quieter as well - not only because the SSD is completely silent as expected, but also the laptop fan seems to kick in less often. Probably because loading things quicker it allows the CPU to spend less time at higher frequency and keep the CPU temperature lower.
Some totally empirical load timings in Windows:
| Seagate 7200.4 | Kingston SSDNow v300 | |
| Windows 8.1 Pro (x64) boot to desktop (incl POST) | 50s | 20s |
| Firefox 27 | 8s | 3s |
| Chrome 32 | 10s | 2s |
| Eclipse 4.3.1 x64 standard (empty workspace) | 33s | 12s |
| Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2013 for Desktop | 23s | 5s |
The SSD drive tops at 250 MB/sec and that seems to be in line with the SATA revision 2 (300 MB/s) interface, as shown by PC Wizard 2013 below. I will install this in my desktop as well and see how it performes in there, Kingston is rating it up to 450 MB/s with SATA revision 3 (600 MB/s) interface.
Finally, WEI rating for primary hard drive went up accordingly from 5.9 to 7.7.