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SSD - OCZ Vertex Plus 120 sata ii (W7 Pro installed, might reinstall with home premium seeing how I realy don't need XP mode like I thought I would)
Dell Laptop d-820 (96' ish designed for XP) Centrino Duo 1.6 4 gigs ddr2
Processor 4.6
Ram 4.6
Graphics 3.5 / 3.2
Hard Disk 6.9
Boot time 31 seconds. Shutdown time 5-6 seconds.
Note; Laptop used mostly at camp off grid solar power, (12v -to- 19.5v converter). With the SSD the total avg power draw is about 1/3 less amp. DC 2.5 before, avg 1.7 with ssd, keep in mind this is not a high end laptop even in it's day. Ment for business jazz. I mainly use it to run a few spreadsheets, track solar info, dvd player, view photo's etc.
What do you guys think of hybrid SSD? I know for some, they wouldn't give it a second look. But it looks like Seagate finally got the latest firmware issues corrected with their hybrid Momentus line. It's so tempting to get 750Gb for "near" SSD performance at less than what you'd pay for a quality 256Gb SSD.
Another thing... Sandisk recently came out with "Ready Cache". It's a 32Gb card (just $55 on Amazon right now) you install in your system that essentially creates a virtual hybrid SSD, using your existing hard drive.
A hybrid HDD may be a good upgrade. From what I've read w7 handles caching well and your write/read speeds will be somewhere between a Raptor and a SSD.
I think the cache card will offer similar performance.
My Honda minivan is "near" as fast as a Porsche 911 Turbo S.
"PorscheSSD there is no substitute."
I don't own a hybrid, but I have read very controversial comments about it. I guess it is a matter of trying.
Given the choice of a 250GB SSD and a 750GB hybrid I would always vote for the SSD. Very few people will have a need to put more the 250GBs of stuff on a fast access device. And the rest can go on a normal HDD - even an external.
I run 4 laptops on 60GB and 90GB SSDs plus external devices and never had a need for more space on the internal disk. Most space is taken by the images and videos and that goes to the externals anyhow.
I am always stunned by the disk space requirements that some people seem to have. On this desktop here I have a 60GB Vertex2 from where I run Windows7 and Virtual Box with Windows 8 and Ubuntu - and I have 20GB of free space on the Vertex. All my user data is on one of the internal HDDs though.
I think your average computer user is not a very good steward of their computer. I've gotten to see the computers of family and friends over the years. Only once did I find someone who had a well maintained file system. Most of the time people copy files someplace and then forget about them. I've seen in some cases people having duplicates of the same files as well. So... letting random activities like this progress and eventually you end up with a drive consumed with clutter.
The problem is that people learn how to use a computer, but not maintain it. A Mac is pretty good about shielding the user from burdens like defragging and deleting temp files. While Microsoft finally added a fairly useful "disk cleanup", the default defrag program is extremely limited and not very effective if you've got less than 25% disk space free. And the problem with how it works is that if you schedule it automatically, inevitably the defragging will take place while you're in the middle of something and processing performance slows down quite a bit.
I have a large music archive that takes up 30Gb of space, and I need to keep it local. However, I also have a lot of video files as well and after doing some inventory checking, I've realized that there is plenty of stuff on there that I rarely access. I've moved that off to an external storage drive.
Have just fitted a SanDisk Extreme 120GB to my old Toshiba A200 laptop and it is just flying but am just wondering what everyone thinks of these AS SSD test results as I am not overly familiar with what they mean, as compared to some of the other shots I have seen they don't scrub up too well.
I bought this drive to try and usually use Samsung 830 or the Crucial M4 but it is a marked improvement on the old HDD with a boot of 28 seconds to login.