How much increase in battery life can one expect fitting an SSD in place of a conventional HDD.
Any makes to avoid? So far contemplating a Westrn digital 250Gb from Ebuyer, £75.
I wouldn't expect you'll discern any difference in battery performance. In most cases, much of the advantages claimed for SSDs are marketing hyperbole. I'd advocate a hybrid drive.
I have 14 laptops (I hire them out) all have their hard disks changed to SSD. They perform 2-4 times faster than with hard disks. I have trialled hybrid drives and find that they give only a minor performance difference. So my recommendation is to go for an SSD.
Richard
Random first post!
I don't think anyone would question the speed benefits of going for an SSD, but the OP asked specifically about battery life, where I'd expect no discernible difference.
Yes I have to agree battery life would probably not be too different. There doesn't seem to be much technical interest in that aspect, speed is most peoples requirement. In theory SSD should be less power hungry.
I agree also it was random first post but I know an awful lot more about computers than I do about N Gauge!!
CHEERS
Just backing up what others have posted, I've not noticed much of a difference in battery life with SSDs either: speed is the main reason for buying them. I have put them in a number of the work laptops (or bought laptops with them already fitted), and have just bought a dozen new desktops with them, which I will be monitoring the performance of.
Just to agree with everybody fir SSD for speed improvements not reduced power consumption, there will be some but not as much as you might expect
Heho, question for all you ssd people, according to norton utilities defragmenting a ssd drive will reduce lifespan ?, is this true ? And if so how to keep in ssd in shape
Quote from: Maurits71 on February 07, 2017, 07:30:19 PM
Heho, question for all you ssd people, according to norton utilities defragmenting a ssd drive will reduce lifespan ?, is this true ? And if so how to keep in ssd in shape
SSDs are designed to even out the writes over the drive, which means that they don't necessarily write sequentially. All this is handled by the SSD's own controller, so it may look sequential to the computer but actually isn't - so all that defragmenting would do is move from one non-sequential arrangement to another. The reason why defragmenting is done on mechanical drives is because the drives has to physically move the head and spin the disc to the correct location, so if data is scattered about, as happens when the drive becomes fragmented, this slows it down as the head has to move about a lot. SSDs are reading flash memory chips, so this doesn't apply - nothing moves.
The only requirement of SSDs is that the empty blocks are set to zero before being re-written (unlike a mechanical drive where it just removes the entries in the file allocation tables, and leaves the actual data until it gets over-written). The process of setting the empty blocks to zero is called trimming, and is done in the background by modern drives - although you can run various utilities to do it too.
Recent releases of Windows (certainly Windows 10, and I think 8 too) are aware of SSDs and if you run the defrag utility it will offer the option to trim the drive, which it can do, but won't try to defragment it.
SSDs have a finite number of read/write cycles, so theoretically defragmenting could reduce the lifespan by repeatedly reading and writing to them, although I've never actually come across this happening. The main thing to bear in mind is that defragmenting will achieve absolutely nothing as you will just end up with a different non-sequential data arrangement to the one you started with, so there's no point in doing it.
Quote from: Maurits71 on February 07, 2017, 07:30:19 PM
Heho, question for all you ssd people, according to norton utilities defragmenting a ssd drive will reduce lifespan ?, is this true ? And if so how to keep in ssd in shape
According to
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047513/fragging-wonderful-the-truth-about-defragging-your-ssd.html (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047513/fragging-wonderful-the-truth-about-defragging-your-ssd.html)
all you need to do is ensure that TRIM is enabled under Windows 7 and later. If you're running XP, as I do, you just have to 'leave well alone'.
My SSD is so fast compared with the previous hard disk (and the hybrid drive in my other computer) that I've never noticed a speed problem.
If you want to risk it, Defraggler claims to support SSD.
If the drive is badly fragmented, I guess the safest way would be to copy it to an external drive, format it and then copy it back again. I'd only do that with a data drive, though, not a system drive.
Quote from: keithfre on February 07, 2017, 08:18:07 PM
If you want to risk it, Defraggler claims to support SSD.
If the drive is badly fragmented, I guess the safest way would be to copy it to an external drive, format it and then copy it back again. I'd only do that with a data drive, though, not a system drive.
But it won't make any positive difference even if you do! SSDs by their design tend to fragment the data, but because of the way they work this isn't a problem (it's actually an advantage as it avoids wearing out specific parts of the drive). Even if the computer things it's defragmented, it won't be. Them being fragmented won't impact on the speed because they use flash memory, not a spinning disc and a head on a motorised arm.
Agree. There's no point defragging an SSD. Flash memory (what's in an ssd) is random access so it doesn't care if the bits of data you are asking for are adjacent on the chip or not. It makes no difference to the response time. Best case defragging is a waste of time, worst case you are using up the (finite) life of the ssd. That said, lifespan of ssds has been improving quite quickly over the last few years. If it's in a laptop you're probably pretty safe because the battery, screen or keyboard are likely to die before the ssd does.
The new generation of SSD's are also self healing so as the Flash memory degrades it gets dropped out of use before it fails. this seriously extends their life.
I agree fully that defrag is not necessary and with some drives harmful. As far as battery life is concerned I have noticed an increase in battery life, I do have a double size battery and when fully charged runs about 5 hours against just under 4 before on a Toshiba laptop.
I had a hybrid drive which didn't appear to speed the system up, all it does is keep the most used data or programmes in a fast access flash section of the drive. The more data the less chance it will be in the fast access area.
I use a crucial 1 tb SSD with 8 gb PC memory and it runs very fast.
Personally, I cannot praise SSDs too highly. I fitted a Samsung 850 PRO 256GB SSD to my five year old ThinkPad X121 (2nd generation Intel i3) and the difference is amazing. Basically I got another year out of the machine and only recently upgraded it a new i7 ThinkPad at Christmas. The old ThinkPad has 8GB RAM and runs Windows 10 quite happily - it boots in about 10 seconds.
As for battery life - I would say I get an extra an hour with the SSD so probaly a 20-25% improvement.
Hope this helps.
Paddy
As already said really SSD all the way I have an Evo 840 in my PC and a integral p series in my laptop. Both running windows 10, they both boot within seconds, and for laptop reduced noise, less heat and a improvement on battery life. Certainly a major improvement from a std 5400rpm hdd fitted to most laptops. I would recommend a fresh install too
I've just replaced the HD in my macbook with an SSD. Upgrading ram to the max at the same time. The 320gb HD was replaced with a 250gb SSD. Significant increase in performance but so far hadnt thought about or noticed any battery life increase.
Going to try the same thing with the kids Netbook next
There should be a power saving based on how the drives operate.
In a Traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD) the disk is span by a motor constantly as because the drives are so slow (In comparison to everything else going on in the computer) they need to be ready instantly ('eco' drives are designed to spin down when not needed but there is a time delay.)
As for fragmentation a SSD does not need De-fragmented as the way the computer interfaces with a SSD is different.
In HDD's. The computer has complete control over a HDD (To the point an expert could change any exact point of data on the drive using only manual commands)
One of the major reason for fragmentation is that in order to preserve the life of the disk the computer always rights data to unused parts of the disk before starting from the beginning again. This means as data is move or deleted gaps may appear which may then be filled with data which needs to be split up as it doesn't fit.
In SSD's. The computer has no control and only gives requests or gives data too/from a controller board thus has little to no control over fragmentation.
A good controller board will manage fragmentation/ de-fragmentation however the speed means that it is unnoticeable. Self healing for example works by the controller stopping data being written to a fault chip and moves the data to a different part of the drive. If the same thing was done on a HDD it would be noticeable because of the speed but here is isn't.
With regard to Defragging being harmful; Old drive had a low number (Still in the 100 of thousands) of times it could be written to before they would break so moving the data around unnecessarily would severally harm the life expectancy.
In a modern drive this is not so much of an issue. Modern Controller boards and good quality Defragging software should both negate any negative impact if a user attempts to defragment a SSD drive but you still don't need to do it.
The purpose of defragging is to minimise the movement of the read write head as mechanical movements take time.
All defragging does is gather each file and put it continuously on the drive. Most start at the beginning of the drive and work through file by file (excluding system files), quite often moving data not yet dealt with to create space. On large drives (mainframe computers) there was a lot of effort put into how the data was mapped on the drive, now the average person would hardly notice the difference between a defragged drive and one that has not been defragged ever as the speed of PC's is so fast.
OK I've ordered a WD 250Gb SSD, should arrive later today. The laptop currently has a 500Gb drive (nowhere near full), I'm hoping I can clone the C:\ partition only, for which I've downloaded Clonezilla and burnt that to disc. From what I've read it should only be necessary to clone that C:\partition, the rest of the data etc in other partitions can be copied normally
Tried to get the clone software to work but the laptop refused to boot from the Clone CD (supposedly bootable Linux) but only finally booted after I removed the hard disk, which rather defeated the object. I've now installed Win7 pro 64 on the SSD and will have to reload the other software; at least I can copy the data and images, or maybe just plug in the original drive in a USB caddy for most of it.
Ah well, keeps me busy and off the streets!
Or just keep tapping the manual boot select hotkey (usually F12) when the PC powers up. This should bring up a list of all the drives and ask you to select which one you want to boot from.
I had a similar problem. It turned out the drive was formatted but didn't have a system marker so it could only be used as a secondary drive. Reformatting fixed it. Loading a fresh install would also have fixed it
I did change boot order in BIOS, however it seems that quite a few PCs and laptops look for a Windows boot sector and ignore anything else. Anyway decided to take the "conventional route" and installed 7Pro from CD and will reinstall other software, not a lot as it's only a laptop.
I do the serious stuff on two AMD 10- series machines with 2Tb and 16Gb.