Thread: USB 3.0/SATA drive    

My brother's laptop has one of these and he was wondering if he got a SATA drive if he could plug it into that port externally and put an OS on there and boot from it instead of booting from the laptop's HDD and if so how much faster would it be to have the OS and any important applications on it and using the HDD as data?

you can get a 120ish GB SSD for under 100 if you do some searching, no reason to slow things down with an external except for what Isiolia said for some games but with 120ish GB you should be fine

64gb ones are avail for 50 or so right now, Ive even considered swapping my 500gb laptop HD for an SSD for giggles

How difficult is it to swap a laptop hdd for a ssd?

Yea I know that much, just never worked with an SSD before, so didn't know if it went in the same slot or not, etc.

1. Buy SSD / external cable/enclosure ($10)
2. Make a Clonezilla bootable disc or USB drive.
3. Connect new SSD to laptop via USB cable -> SATA
4. Run Clonezilla to clone the hard drive onto the new SSD
5. Wait for it to finish, pop out the old drive, pop in the new SSD.
6. Enjoy 5 second bootup time.

About the OP question, AFAIK those eSATA/USB combo ports only include USB2. After all they were only for bridging the time until USB3 is out. So you'd have either the choice of using a USB2 HDD (way slower than an internal drive, and Windows doesn't really like booting from USB) or eSATA (external power supply needed, eSATA doesn't deliver any power).

About swapping a HDD against an SSD, not too complicated as long as the notebook has a standard 2,5" HDD (which is likely when it's still from the time when eSATAp was used). SSDs come in 2 "flavors", 9,5mm and 7mm height, both in normal 2,5" format. Most laptops have 9,5mm drives, only veeery flat models use the 7mm ones. Normally you just have to open the laptop, remove the HDD, unscrew it from any frames and put the SSD in instead. That's it, install windows etc and be happy with your new, speedy OS ^^

€dit:
@xero: wouldn't recommend cloning from HDD to SSD. Not only that it's in some cases impossible when you already have more space in use than the SSD can handle (or resizing the partition to fit isn't possible because the data blocks are too scattered), a fresh install of Win7 adjusts itself to the SSD (like turning auto-defrag off). That might also happen after cloning, but doesn't always work.
Plus, on a fresh system you get rid of temporary folders and other crap from the old install and only rescue the important stuff over from the old disk. Might be more effort to search everything together, but worth it IMHO.

Originally Posted by Niya

About swapping a HDD against an SSD, not too complicated as long as the notebook has a standard 2,5" HDD (which is likely when it's still from the time when eSATAp was used). SSDs come in 2 "flavors", 9,5mm and 7mm height, both in normal 2,5" format. Most laptops have 9,5mm drives, only veeery flat models use the 7mm ones. Normally you just have to open the laptop, remove the HDD, unscrew it from any frames and put the SSD in instead. That's it, install windows etc and be happy with your new, speedy OS ^^

Most laptop HDD bays/chassis can support any size of SSD, unless we are dealing with an Ultrabook or Air.

Also, you can skip what I said if you are just installing a fresh OS on the drive, but in most cases if you are trying to 'upgrade' you mine as well just clone the drive.

bump, he was asking me about any particular brands since black friday/cyber monday is right around the corner. Basically the cheapest he can get away with while still being reliable. Any brands to absolutely stay away from and which are good but not retard expensive (like Samsung)

Edit:
Screw it, want one myself as well, was saving black friday money for an extra HDD, and this is a bit more/will break the bank, but fuck it.

I've no clue where to even start though, the cheapest one I see would be (in the 240-256 range)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167127
but how good is it?

How would it compare to something like?
http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology...T3-256G+2.5%22

Basically the $160 one is stretching it for me, so I'll set that as my upper limit.

What would be the best ssd I could get in that price range?

Hate to do a second bump, but sale won't be around forever and the Samsung 830 is back in stock.

I hear it's all the rave but is it worth an extra $40 as compared to the intel or an extra $20-30 as compared to what else has been posted?

Samsung makes pretty good quality SSDs if I remember correctly. Never had experience with Intels but they're rated well.

Intel and Samsung are top tier. I prefer Intel personally. If the brand is the only price factor, then buy the cheapest one. If you're looking at going deals, the best SSD deal I've seen is: http://www.amazon.com/Mushkin-Enhanc...764647&sr=1-29

Mushkin is a good brand from what I've read (Good support I hear), so the brand isn't an issue. I've heard issues with OCZ though, so stray from that imo. The link I posted had the best GB/dollar among brands that look good to buy. If you want to buy a cheaper one (You should stay at 120-128GB+ imo) you can check TigerDirect's Intel SSD deal. Otherwise, buy the Mushkin SSD linked.

Intel and Samsung have the big advantage that they produce their flash chips themselves and can pick the good ones for the pricier SSDs. Other manufacturers just buy the chips from other companies and can never be 100% sure about the quality.
Firmware quirks and other problems can happen with any brand, i still remember the 8MB bug on some Intel SSD. So rather than picking by brand, pick by price, transfer speed, IOPS and controller chip.

Sandforce controllers can deliver horrendously fast transfers, but only when they're able to compress the data. So if you mainly feed them with non-compressable data (like pictures/videos etc) the speed drops quite a bit. Other controllers that don't use hardware compression don't have that problem but have other scenarios where they slow down, or they deliver slower speeds in general.

Overall, IOPS >> transfer speeds. Sure, it's nice to get 400+MByte/s on linear reads/writes, but unless you use the disk as a cache drive for video recording or something like this it's most of the time completely irrelevant. What matters more is that the disk is responsive on random reads/writes which happen all the time when you use it as a system disk, and that's where the IOPS (Input/Output operations per second) kick in. Magnet HDDs can reach up to ~200 IOPS, SSDs can deliver several thousand. That's why they "feel" so damn fast even when the flash chips aren't the fastest.

What is a good IOS?
What is a top-tier IOS?
How can I test the IOS of my SSD?

ended up going with the intel 335 yesterday since it was the cheapest one that wasn't getting many complaints (based on what I could find) and this thread was dead xD.

Thanks anyways for those who gave input today

I've read that the more space taken, the slower it'll perform.

That being said, how much free space should I be looking to keep?

At the moment, I only have files I find essential on my SSD and everything else on the HDD I replaced with the SSD in an enclosure.

After formatting and what not, I have 223gb available of the 240gb.


Between windows 7, microsfot (word, excel, powerpoint), drivers, windows updates, and my school stuff (approx 700mb), I have 177gb fre, which means I have 46gb of stuff.

Subtracting school and microsoft, that's about 44 gigs on just windows 7 + updates and drivers? Does that sound like much and is there anything non essential that I can cut out?

Would like to run XIV (when 2.0 hits) and possibly League of Legends (if I begin playing that) on the SSD (or would running them in the usb 3.0 HDD be fine w/o a performance drop?) w/o lowering performance due to too much space being taken up. I'll assume XI will be safe to run on the HDD with usb 3.0 speeds?

Basically any info about SSDs would be appreciated, thanks

Do not listen to that moron on FFXIAH telling you to defrag. That shit will destroy your SSD according to every source I've read. Make sure your PC is using AHCI mode. If not, you'll need to do a registry hack. To check whether you're using AHCI mode, go into BIOS and look around for AHCI or IDE (You want AHCI though). To use BIOS mode, look for the button to press while starting the PC from cold boot (Usually says when you start up the PC). To keep your SSD at optimal performance, use AHCI, TRIM, and avoid unnecessary writes (Quick format instead of full format). Since you have an Intel, I recommend using Intel RST and Intel Toolbox.

As for space, go with 15-20GB remaining imo.

Btw, if you want to check performance: http://release.crystaldew.info/redir...MarkShizuku-en