On 16/01/2021 08:36, alan_m wrote:

On 16/01/2021 01:49, Fredxx wrote:

Still agree with John about SSDs. They make boot time shrink. They are
more rugged and take less power (I think). Though always back them up
as they tend to fail catastrophically without notice.


I fitted a SSD to my previous laptop and really didn't notice that much
change in boot up time. Yes there was some increase in speed but again
only for some activities, noticeably when virus checking the whole
system etc. At the time I didn't think the investment worth it for the
performance increase. The performance of the hard disk on my previous
machine may not have been the bottle neck or the factor limiting the speed.

IME the amount of difference you get depends on a number of variables.

Laptops with really slow CPUs don't benefit as much since the bottleneck
simple moves to the CPU[1].

For medium spec and up however there is more scope for improvement. On
i3 or i5 based machines (or comparable AMD platforms) the change can be
dramatic.

The way you use it also matters. If you boot, then load and use one
program at a time, you will see less benefit since you are not relying
on that much disk access anyway. If however you have a bunch of apps
open at any one time and swap back and fourth between them you will get
more impact from a slow disc.

Many years on, prices now for SSD are different so if the usage of the
laptop doesn't require massive amounts of hard disk space then SSD may
be worth investigating to increase speed.Â* What would you do with the
speed increase that you are not doing now.

Years on, the speed of SSDs has also improved. Most reasonable SSDs from
known brands will run as fast at the 6Gb/s SATA interface can go - so
typically top out about 560 MB/sec.

More modern laptops often now have M2 drives, and some of those support
a NVMe interface. That removes the bottleneck of the SATA connection, so
read speeds of 2500MB/sec are not uncommon.

I'm probably in the market for a new machine (laptop) sometime this year
and I will seriously consider one with SSD rather than one with spinning
rust.

There is very little reason to go for a standard HDD these days. For
mobile use SSD wins on every count except cost per GB, and even that is
not as dramatic as once was. So unless you really must have 2TB of
storage on the laptop, go SSD.

(IME for most users, 250GB is usually plenty)

I believe that one thing to watch with current machines is that
the SSD also has a form factor much like RAM modules that slot into

Yup that's the M2 drive format. Note that M2 sockets are not all the
same - some only do a version of SATA, while some have the faster option
of NVMe.

connectors BUT some manufactures are now soldering the chips directly on
to the main board so no easy DIY upgrade path is possible if a larger
SSD is required.

Apple being one of the main culprits on that!


[1] Also worth noting that windows versions before Win 7 don't support a
feature of SSDs called "trim" - so performance slowly degrades with
time. Another problem on systems built with Win XP can be the
partitioning software did not always align the start of partitions on
page boundaries, and that also hurts SSD performance.



--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/