Windows 7 - Upgrade to SSD? (SATA II)

Obvious reliability due to lack of moving parts argument aside, how much of a realistic performance gain (read/write speeds) can I expect by replacing my notebook's 7200 RPM HDD with a SSD? Keep in mind I'm talking SATA II controller not SATA III.

Even on sata2 you'll be looking at 250-300Mbps read/write speed. So a giant improvement.

its a worth while investment, and you've the bonus of being able to shove your laptops current drive in a caddy and have a portable HHD

Just for comparison, what is the average read/write of a conventional SATA II HDD? forgive my ignorance...and my laziness to do my own research.

The gain in read write speeds is good but the 100 fold gain in access time is really what makes it fly. Coupled with the fact that notbook drives are notoriously slow to start with, it's night and day!

I recently replaced the craptastic notebook spinner in my otherwise somewhat high end laptop with an SSD. It was a Sony so I was able to get all the OEM drivers for all the funky bits working completely with a clean windows install. It now behaves like it SHOULD. Laptop drives slow you down on any disk io, program launching, booting etc so much.

Only problem is, you will likely lose a lot of storage space, but if ou really don;t NEED that 500 meg drive and a 60 or 120 will do... AND if you can restore all your oem drivers. Then it's definately a win!

These are a couple of old benchmarks I have. it should give you a rough idea of the performance disparity.

Conventional HDD (RAID 0 - sorry, don't have a single HDD benchmark):



And a Crucial C300 on Sata II:



SSD wins.

Both on exact same moboard and SATA 2 or correctly Sata 3.0Gbs Intel controller.

My WD CaviarBlack 7200RPM before SSD installed.
Note max Read speed and access time.

12.1ms on WD.
0.116ms on the Intel 320.

111.2 MB/s WD
262.04 MB/s Intel 320

And note that a laptop HD will typically be MUCH slower than a 7200RPM desktop drive. Like 2-4 times slower transfer rate.

Thanks everybody! I think my questions have been answered.

Well, the notebook in question is an 18" HP DV8T. It came with 2 X 500 GB HDDs. I'm barely using one of them.

The plan is to replace the boot drive with an SSD and use the other one for all my data. I'm doing that with my MAINGEAR desktop set up and it is outstanding!

I've done clean installs on both the MAINGEAR desktop and another, different laptop and had only negligible problems with drivers. I had to search for and run in XP Compatibilty 2 drivers on the older laptop. Other than that, Windows 7 has amazed me with the speed it takes to go from format to running computer! The HP laptop is modern (except for the SATA II controller). I don't foresee any problems with Windows automatically finding drivers for it.

Your welcome Bug67.


fseal
Now I see why everyone that adds an SSD to a laptop is so amazed. They have a much bigger "relative" performance gain.