OK, having resolved most of my laptop upgrade options in a previous thread I'm now trying to resolve the mass storage options for my best fit.  My laptop (HP6910p) takes a 2.5" SATA 2 drive.

 

Options are conventional hard disk (HDD), solid state disk (SSD) or a hybrid of the two (Hybrid).  Pros and cons as far as I know at this point are:

 

HDD:

pro: cheap, more GB/£, established technology, readily available

con: end-of-life issues?, heat. power consumption, working life (3years+)

 

SSD:

pro: glf (go like f***), excellent impact shock resistance, upcoming technology now entering mainstream

con: price, rewrite life (although notes on previous thread suggest this is not an issue)

 

Hybrid:

pro: cheaper than SSD, more GB/£

con: too new?, how much SSD needs to be available to gain the benefits?

 

Any more thoughts out there?

 

Regards, Mike

Changed my Samsung i3 laptop with 4GB RAM from a HDD to a SSD.  Well worth doing.

Depends what you want from it.

Sorry chaps, got pulled away before I could post properly; now done.

 

Regards, Mike

Shoved a 128gb ssd in me daughters sony vaio lappy last year. Goes like stink now. All she does on it is facebook uToob and surfin. Not much storage needed so a cheap ssd was suffice (and I upgraded my gaming desktop to a bigger ssd therefore had it spare anyways).

 

SSD was a crucial M4 128gb. (a few years old now)

Just found this note on Crucial's site regarding power consumption:

 

"Based on published specs, a common laptop hard drive uses 2.5 watts of power on an average workload, compared to 0.15 watts on the Crucial M550 (which is up to 94% more energy efficient)."

 

http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=D69C95CAA5CA7304

 

Regards, Mike

If massive storage is not needed then go ssd. It really is a no brainer.

I opted for Hybrid last year when my laptop was needing an upgrade.

I was after maximum storage, but the SSD was too pricey in that regard ie > 750GB

 

From my experience - the hybrid has some small benefits - but if you can afford it - go SSD.

Speed, reliability, thermal, battery life, etc - all good reasons to spend on SSD i think. 

SSD for speed, spinning rust for volume.

 

Hybrids are a bit expensive for the benefits I'd just stick with the SSD and buy a terabyte external drive if you need more space.

 

BUT.... bear in mind they do fail without warning so backing up is important.

 bear in mind they do fail without warning so backing up is important.

 

Does that suggest a catastrophic failure is more likely than a gradual deterioration as for spinning rust?

 

Are there any prior indications to look out for?

 

Regards, Mike

What is it you're looking ot get from the storage?

 

What sort of things do you use/want to use and how hard a life does the laptop get.

 

As for the power figures, treat them with a pinch of salt...

Does that suggest a catastrophic failure is more likely than a gradual deterioration as for spinning rust?

 

Are there any prior indications to look out for?

 

Regards, Mike

 

Yes, an SSD tends to fail without warning and there's no chance of recovery after that.  There doesn't tend to be any warning before it goes either.

 

Hard drive failures can vary considerably, sometimes you will get some warning that they're on the way out (random software corruption that keeps happening) and you can recover data back, sometimes they have a more serious failure and you can still get data back through software although even in the worst cases you can usually still recover data through specialist data recovery companies although that can be expensive.  Hard drives can suddenly fail without warning and they're also very sensitive to impacts so one bang can kill the drive.

 

Regardless of SSD or hard drive, you should make sure any files that are important are backed up - I'd probably trust SSD's slightly more than a hard drive but I wouldn't ever trust data on a single system.

 

As for which to go for, it depends on your budget - SSD's are a lot more viable now as mass storage than they used to be as 500GB drives are around £200 and 1TB drives around £320.  That's obviously still a lot more than an equivalent hard drive but personally I'd probably go for a Samsung Evo 750GB or Crucial M500 960GB for a single laptop drive for the performance, the lower power consumption and less heat.

 

John

There was a version of my HP laptop with an ssd for Windows and a hdd.

I wonder if mine has a spare slot?

There was a version of my HP laptop with an ssd for Windows and a hdd.

I wonder if mine has a spare slot?

 

Entirely possible and worth checking, quite a few machines came with 32GB small msata SSD's for caching and a standard 2.5in bay for a standard drive.  As msata drives are fairly cheap these days (only slightly more if any than standard SSD's) you can have a standard boot drive on the msata slot and the main bay for storage,

 

John

Id say go for SSD. As for longevity take a look at this.. http://techreport.com/review/25320/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-22tb-update

 

Bearing in mind I use my pc for a few hours each day, my SSD over 6 months has used......0.8TB.
The test has gone as far as 100TB before seeing errors..........in my case that would be around.............62 years before it starts having trouble! I'd say that should last you