Replacing laptop hard drive with SSD

[Pengwuino]

Does anyone have any experience with replacing a laptops hard drive with a solid state drive? I want to buy a cheap little laptop, an Acer, but also buy a solid state drive and immediately swap out the mechanical drive for a solid state drive. Does anyone know if this is typically possible?

I'm talking to someone at ACER and they are saying it's possible but who knows how many dollars this guy gets per year :P.

DISCUSS :D

 

[QuarkCharmer]

http://www.crucial.com/store/ssd.aspx?cpe=pd_google_us&gclid=CMu6qvmkt6oCFYwe2god8ErZ8Q

Use drop-down to put in the model of your acer.

 

[Pengwuino]

I did and the thing is, the model # newegg has and the model # of the SSD that is compatible with it are not the same. The thing is, I'm wondering if they just may not have tested it, maybe since the one that is stated as compatible seems like a newer model they just rather you buy a newer model, I'm not sure.

http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=A75+Pro4 the 64gb on here is the one I see on newegg. I feel like I'm taking a gamble but in all my experience, comparability issues rarely come up with hardware that seems to be so close to one another.

 

[mege]

Given the cost of the SSD - why are you trying to do so? Unless you're going to use the machine on a rollercoaster, there's not a physical reason to do so and if you're getting a cheap laptop then the HDD isn't going to be as much of a bottleneck anyhow.

 

[Pengwuino]

Given the cost of the SSD - why are you trying to do so? Unless you're going to use the machine on a rollercoaster, there's not a physical reason to do so and if you're getting a cheap laptop then the HDD isn't going to be as much of a bottleneck anyhow.

SSD FAST SEX :D

Actually I need to get my feet wet in the SSD area. The laptop will be for general everyday stuff and I need to replace this one because it feels like it's petering out. It's cheap and if anything, I can take it out and use it in another computer if need be. I also plan on using this laptop for any presentations and instructions I need to do so I rather not be sitting around waiting for some stupid presentation or video to load off my slow hard drives.

The laptops a dual core and the original 5400rpm hard drive would probably be the bottleneck so for how cheap everything is, it'll be a nice little experiment.

 

[MATLABdude]

As long as you have your own install media (and not the one that's probably sitting on a partition on the hard drive), you should be okay. Worse comes to worse, you just pop the original back in.

 

[Stengah]

I put an SSD in my laptop, and it definitely improved performance. MUCH faster boot time. I can't imagine there being any compatibility issues, as long as you get the right size. Most are 2.5" anyways. When I got my laptop, I just took the SSD out of my desktop and through it in there and everything was fine.

 

[Pengwuino]

Well there was a slight problem with what I did. It turns out the SSD was like 1mm too long so the mounting brace didn't mount correctly so I had to do a little ... screwing things in in manners they shouldn't have been screwed into get everything to close back up.

This thing is amazing. I clocked my boot sequence at 34 seconds with the 5400rpm drive. Now it's 10 seconds flat from power button to windows asking my password. Honestly, I can't even keep up with this thing. I'm just TRYING to think of things that might tax the hard drive to see how well it works but I can't.

 

[MATLABdude]

Shuffle a few gigabytes of stuff back and forth off of the drive and to your backup? Although the connection to your backup is probably going to be the bottleneck.

EDIT: That 10 second boot-up is probably as fast as the wakeup sequence on my computer!

 

[Pengwuino]

I've pretty much cleared off as much useless crap off this drive as possible and installed my basic program needs. I now have about 25GB left. I can probably put a few games on this thing but this was never meant to be a gaming laptop :) And of course I could always upgrade, this was more of a test to see how sextastic SSD is :D

 

[Shovel]

I've pretty much cleared off as much useless crap off this drive as possible and installed my basic program needs. I now have about 25GB left. I can probably put a few games on this thing but this was never meant to be a gaming laptop :) And of course I could always upgrade, this was more of a test to see how sextastic SSD is :D

You can free up tons of space on most modern systems by doing a few things:

If you have a decent amount of memory, adjust the windows page file size. Memory usage on even the most inefficient consumer software (I'm looking at you, firefox) has not scaled with low memory prices in recent years, so page files are mostly obsolete. Don't turn it off, as some improperly coded software will assume a page file exists; set it to a fixed size. I use 512mb on my desktop with 12gb ram. By default it will be the size of your memory which on a modern system with a ssd can be 15% of your disk space or more.

Turn off hibernate, the hibernate file is the same size as your total memory, and is not needed on ssds due to the 10s boot time and 1s app launch time. Once again can use a huge portion of the disk if you have a lot of memory.

Disable system restore, it can use tons of disk space and only works in very rare circumstances. If a problem occurs just reinstall windows, it takes 5 minutes now. All your bulk data should be on a conventional magnetic drive anyway. Optionally make image backups and store them on said magnetic drive to avoid having to reinstall software/updates if it happens.

Do a quick run of CCleaner or other such file deletion tool - bad programmers forget to delete their temp files, they can add up to gigabyte levels rather quickly.