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I am interested in upgrading to a faster, lower power SSD for N120. From what I am reading, there are “SSD’s and there are SSD’s” as they say. It seems Intel get the highest marks, but I am confused by the power specs for the Extreme and the Mainstream product lines. There is a difference in write speeds. How fast does the HDD in the NC120 write/read? It looks like the Intel Mainstream with 70Mb/s write. 150 milliwatts write power, and .06 watts (60 milliwatts idle) may be the best compromise. This compares to 2-2.5 watts for write from most others I have looked at.
Thanks
From what I have read there is no real gain in SSD’s on power usage. Only on speed of reading and no moving parts. Also they weigh pretty much the same.
i have been considering to upgrade to SSDs for some time and I must share with you my findings and the reason why i decided against it in the end.
1) SSD and power consumption
The power consumption is undoubtedly better. However here’s the catch. SSD only has a on or off mode, unlike traditional harddisks with a “suspend” mode. Hence, SSDs most of the time are on, so you must treat it as if it’s drawing 2W constantly as you are using it. This may constitute as a 50% – 100% improvement over traditional harddisk which draw between 3W to 4W, however at rest they draw around the same as SSDs. Your real power savings are in terms of single digit 1 – 2%. Some SSDs even consume more power2) SSD and speed – Degradation Issues
SSDs degrade over time due to inefficient allocation of data. To understand more, google anandtech’s article on SSDs. On XP, it can certainly be even more disastrous. You will notice speed boosts initially, but as time goes it becomes disappointingly slower. Intel at the moment has the least degradation over time., but even they aren’t totally immune to degradation.3) SSD and cost
Well the best SSD with certain solution to fight degradation to a small extent with the best speed is intel’s X25-M. The next best alternative is OCZ’s vertex (which is cheaper). It’s cost is still considerably prohibitive. The cheaper ones come with horrible controllers which makes things worse. I remember reading an article that idilinx barefoot controllers are bad for XP, bad news for those who want to save some money on vertexAll in all, the only advantage i’m gonna get is shockproof. So I’ve finally decided against it.
Welcome to the forum, eventidephoenix, and thank you for such an interesting first post 🙂
For those interested in reading more about SSDs, Anandtech’s article The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ mentioned by eventidephoenix is a good source.
+1 for not installing a SSD drive – the only reason I would do this is if being shockproof became a critical issue for me.
Interesting review… now I know which SSD to buy for my NC20 next Christmas… 🙂 X25-M Postville.
If only the original Samsung drive hadn’t been that slow… I’m thinking that this drive may be the bottleneck playing games as opposed to either the cpu or gpu… Since I actually have that issue talked about on the SSD article with short delays popping up for my Samsung drive… Gets slightly better after defragmentation, but pops up real quick.
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