Solid state disks

Hi all,

Just looking for some advice/experience here.

I manage a fleet of 100 laptops/desktops and I'm pretty new to SSD's working here having never really come across them in my last employment.

Our fleet consists of a few Dell Latitude E6430's that have seemed to be specced with 120GB SSD's. Now the 3 year warranty has just expired and I thought that replacing them with 5 x shiny new Dell E5550's (again with 3y year warranty) was the best idea and cascade the older laptops down to less used/infrequent staff. Same ran, both i5's but slightly bigger screen.

What a bad idea that seemed to be.

The newer laptops seem that much slower and I think that is down to the fact they have spinning drives. Everything from slower boot to waiting for Outlook 2013 to 'process' to icons showing on the desktop. They aren't that bad really but its noticeable against the older SSD equipped laptops.

I'm sort of hooked of the SSD thing now and that spinning disks are cack. I've bought a 120GB Kingston SSD and saved a almost chucked C2D Optiplex, unbelievable how it performs now.

So what next, as laptops are due replacement at 5 years do I just get it an SSD/new battery upgrade and see them out another 3 years?

Confused now, cant turn back the E5550 purchase (that's down to experience) but just thinking for the future replacement plan.

I assume a HDD and battery replacement would the main degradation points of a laptop and just view screen problems as they happen.

Yes, addicted is the word. They are good to feel in the hand too.

What do you reckon on them extending the life of a well run in 3 year old laptop? I'm thinking money saving and gaining brownie points with the management.

The HDD's in the new laptops are 7200rpm, still not on par with the SSD though.

I have been buying Kingston 128GB ssdNOW 300's. Assume these are good buys, I didnt do much research to be honest.

Specs are;

450MB/s read/write, says 10x faster than a 7200rom HDD (can believe it), SATA 3.0 6GB/s (obviously if the machine can support that)

SSDs are really the only way to go with laptops these days as they are impervious to drops. Your Latitudes might have the drop sensor (Free Fall protection) as my E6540 but with an SSD you don't care about that.

The only downside that I know of for SSDs is that they don't typically give any warning when then fail, whereas a spinner does sometimes start making noise or throwing SMART errors in which case you know to hurry-up and protect your data. I have experienced a failed SSD and it's heart-in-the-throat time--it just disappeared without a trace and all my hard work with it.

Well, not really. I do Image backups. You will want these lappys to back their data to your server at every connect, and do image backups whenever you change the configuration (install/update programs eg) and that will be a challenge. But it's something you should be doing anyway whether spinner or SSD.