SSD Harddrive for laptops?

[Boomyal]

Can you replace a conventional harddrive, in a laptop, with one? I have a Toshiba Satellite C655. It's about the same age as JoLin's. It has gotten interminably slow with lagging text, slow page loads and faltering videos. It has otherwise been very reliable.

I have very little 'stuff on this computer with only Microsoft Essentials as protection software. It has a 300 gb conventional harddrive with 223 gb's free. It also only has 4 gb's of RAM. It uses, I guess, a fairly anemic 1.3 ghz AMD E300 CPU. .....but it never used to be this balky. Would drive and RAM upgrades have a positive effect or would it be throwing good money after bad?

 

[sam am I]

Boom,

You bet you can, I popped a 120GB SSD in my old HP running XP a while ago, boots like a rocket now!!! Launches apps faster too!! BUT, it won't fix SW problems that you might have.

Looks like a 240GB (or 120GB) would work fine for you...........Use an imaging SW like Acronis to either clone or make a full w partitions image of the HDD then restore/burn it back on the SSD. Ram upgrade may not do much depends on your apps tho, try the SSD first and go from there.....I'll bet you'll be content just running the SSD.

 

[dingbat]

We switched from SATA to SSD about 3 years ago and I'm quickly becoming disenchanted with SSD drives...

While the physical failures have subsided, we starting to see more and more lost data and file corruptions than ever.

Take this information with a grain of salt. We're using them in industrial automation equipment running 24/7 with constant event logging over-rights, communications read/writes to level 1 and 2 systems and a variety of monitoring and data collection and reporting. Most home computers drives do nowhere near this amount of work.

 

[southkogs]

Did it on one of my MacBooks - yanked the old spinnin' drive and went to a SSD.

SSD will be a better upgrade than RAM. BUT a complete reinstall of the OS may do wonders as well. See Bruce's post in the other topic:

Download Process Explorer. It's basically Task manager on steroids. Look for any processes that you don't recognize. You could even do a screen capture and post it here.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx

One thing that many people suggest is just doing a clean install every few years. Do a good backup and reinstall your whole operating system from scratch. After I do a clean install, I save an image so that its easy to do later. I use Acronis.

6Gb of RAM is plenty of RAM. That should not be your bottleneck.

The amount of Windows update files on your drive does not affect how slow your computer is.

 

[MTboatguy]

Yup, they work the same way, just different technology, I updated one of my laptops a couple of years ago.

 

[Boomyal]

Did it on one of my MacBooks - yanked the old spinnin' drive and went to a SSD.

SSD will be a better upgrade than RAM. BUT a complete reinstall of the OS may do wonders as well. See Bruce's post in the other topic:

I did try to download the link in bruce's post. It downloaded a zip file and when I tried to open it, it opened the 'library' and did not give any options of where to go from there.

 

[gm280]

Both my wife and I just swapped our laptops with SSD drives and the different is night and day. From a dead turned off laptop 'til usable homepage is about 12 seconds now. And no more freeze ups for me. Of course I also installed WIN 10 at the same time. So I can't say that the freeze ups were from the old hard drive. But we would never go back to spinning drives again. And the battery life has increased as well. No battery usage spent spinning a motor anymore. We love it.

 

[Boomyal]

Both my wife and I just swapped our laptops with SSD drives and the different is night and day. From a dead turned off laptop 'til usable homepage is about 12 seconds now. And no more freeze ups for me. Of course I also installed WIN 10 at the same time. So I can't say that the freeze ups were from the old hard drive. But we would never go back to spinning drives again. And the battery life has increased as well. No battery usage spent spinning a motor anymore. We love it.

what did you use to install Win 10? Also what about all the laptop utilities? How do you know if your particular laptop will do well with Win 10?

 

[bruceb58]

I did try to download the link in bruce's post. It downloaded a zip file and when I tried to open it, it opened the 'library' and did not give any options of where to go from there.

Open up the zip file and just chose the 64 bit version or the non 64 bit version and put it on your hard drive. If you downloaded something with a library, you clicked on the wrong link.

 

[bruceb58]

We switched from SATA to SSD about 3 years ago and I'm quickly becoming disenchanted with SSD drives...

Just so you know SATA is the type interface and both SSD and platter drives use SATA interfaces.

Now regarding your failures:

Using SSD for continuous data logging is not what they are intended for. Blasting the same area of the drive over and over is a sure fire way of ruining the flash memory that an SSD drive is made of. SSDs are good for storing info and reading it but really bad if you are writing and over writing the same area of the drive. Your programs should be stored on an SSD and data logging should be done on a platter drive. This is also why you don't ever want to do a defrag on an SSD drive. A fragmented SSD drive suffers no latency degradation so there is no need to defrag. In fact defragging a SSD drive degrades it because you are doing unnecessary writes to it.

Go this article and scan down to the section on "Write Cycles"
https://www.lifewire.com/ssd-buyers-guide-833447

Whoever at your company decided that it would be a good idea to use an SSD for data logging needs to find a new job

 

[bruceb58]

Can you replace a conventional harddrive, in a laptop, with one? I have a Toshiba Satellite C655. It's about the same age as JoLin's. It has gotten interminably slow with lagging text, slow page loads and faltering videos. It has otherwise been very reliable.

I have very little 'stuff on this computer with only Microsoft Essentials as protection software. It has a 300 gb conventional harddrive with 223 gb's free. It also only has 4 gb's of RAM. It uses, I guess, a fairly anemic 1.3 ghz AMD E300 CPU. .....but it never used to be this balky. Would drive and RAM upgrades have a positive effect or would it be throwing good money after bad?

An SSD is not going to help you much. It helps when you boot. It helps when you start a program. Once the program is in RAM, there should be no data swapping with the hard drive or very little so a program that is working slowly is because the processor is handling too many tasks at once or too many tasks are causing the RAM to be shared by too many tasks.

Switching to an SSD is easy. There is software that comes with the drive that clones the current drive and writes the clone to the SSD. Then all you do is turn off the computer, swap drives and boot up. The SSD is the same external form factor of the platter drive you are replacing.

 

[fishrdan]

That's and ol "budget" laptop, and your right on the anemic processor assessment. I wouldn't put much money into it, but you could get an entry level 120GB SSD for around $50..... Some (most?) SSD's come with free cloning software (IE: Acronis) to make the change easy, and you'll likely need a SATA to USB cable to run the migration.

Along with cleaning up the laptops files and programs, you can check the health of the laptop hardware with HWINFO64 (or 32). If the cooler is plugged up and not cooling the processor correctly, HWinfo will tell you if the processor is throttling, and it's temp in real time. The processor should run somewhere around 45-65*c, 90*c max., HWINFO will also list things like battery wear, along with a WHOLE bunch of other specs that will probably be meaningless to you. malwarebytes or superantispyware can be run to see if you picked up malware that's taxing the laptop.

If everything checks out, I don't think you'll be disappointed in upgrading to an SSD. If possible, I would also install a fresh copy of Windows, but that will be much more involved (drivers, Win updates, programs, data) than cloning the old drive.

 

[Boomyal]

That's and ol "budget" laptop, and your right on the anemic processor assessment. I wouldn't put much money into it, but you could get an entry level 120GB SSD for around $50..... Some (most?) SSD's come with free cloning software (IE: Acronis) to make the change easy, and you'll likely need a SATA to USB cable to run the migration.

Along with cleaning up the laptops files and programs, you can check the health of the laptop hardware with HWINFO64 (or 32). If the cooler is plugged up and not cooling the processor correctly, HWinfo will tell you if the processor is throttling, and it's temp in real time. The processor should run somewhere around 45-65*c, 90*c max., HWINFO will also list things like battery wear, along with a WHOLE bunch of other specs that will probably be meaningless to you. malwarebytes or superantispyware can be run to see if you picked up malware that's taxing the laptop.

If everything checks out, I don't think you'll be disappointed in upgrading to an SSD. If possible, I would also install a fresh copy of Windows, but that will be much more involved (drivers, Win updates, programs, data) than cloning the old drive.

which version of HWINFO do I download and install for 64 bit Win7 home premium?

 

[bruceb58]

A 64 bit machine can run either version.

 

[bruceb58]

Did a little research on that laptop. It's pretty low end even for when it came out. I probably wouldn't spend a whole lot of money upgrading it.

 

[Boomyal]

Did a little research on that laptop. It's pretty low end even for when it came out. I probably wouldn't spend a whole lot of money upgrading it.

I knew it was. It was my entry into laptops. It was only $300.00. It has been reliable and its balkyness only seems to be intermittant, but mostly so as of late..

 

[JoLin]

Did a little research on that laptop. It's pretty low end even for when it came out. I probably wouldn't spend a whole lot of money upgrading it.

Bruce, mine was a low-end, $300.00 machine too (2013 Black Friday sale). I understand where Boomya is coming from. Breaking in a new machine can be a real PITA. Struggling with a new OS, re-downloading all the programs and apps you've got on the current computer, etc. When you've got one that's solid and does what you need it to do... it can be worth a few bucks to upgrade it.

My .02

 

[gm280]

what did you use to install Win 10? Also what about all the laptop utilities? How do you know if your particular laptop will do well with Win 10?

Hello Boomyal, we both had Dell Inspiron N5010 laptops with WIN 7 installed. However, my younger son has an IT degree and took them and installed both the SSD drives and WIN 10 on both of the laptops. And then he installed the old drives he removed in cases as backup drives via USB plugs. So how he accomplished that I don't know the particulars. I will ask him when I see him again. But he does those types things all the time for people. And our laptops are like amazingly fast now without any glitches or hangups. Well worth the upgrade and new OS install, that's for sure. Better then I would have ever thought they would work. :smile:

 

[southkogs]

I knew it was. It was my entry into laptops. It was only $300.00. It has been reliable and its balkyness only seems to be intermittant, but mostly so as of late..

Bruce, mine was a low-end, $300.00 machine too (2013 Black Friday sale). I understand where Boomya is coming from. Breaking in a new machine can be a real PITA. Struggling with a new OS, re-downloading all the programs and apps you've got on the current computer, etc. When you've got one that's solid and does what you need it to do... it can be worth a few bucks to upgrade it.

My .02

I get where you guys are coming from, and I sometimes forget that I run computers pretty hard - so, speed and upgrades mean quite a bit to me. I think Bruce's point - and I would agree - is that you can do the upgrades and they may help. BUT bear in mind they may not be able to help much or as much as the money you're putting into the box. Sometimes diverting over to a different machine is going to yield more results for not too much more money.

I've got a buddy who bailed out of a computer altogether and just started working from a Chromebook. He's loving it.

 

[Boomyal]

......I've got a buddy who bailed out of a computer altogether and just started working from a Chromebook. He's loving it.

Might be worth looking into. I mostly use this Toshiba (which is acting very well this morning) for surfing. It looks like you could get into a Chromebook for not much more than the cost of an SSD and RAM upgrade.