Recently I replaced the hard drive in my laptop with an SSD – specifically a Samsung 64GB model (model MMCRE64G5MPP – 0VA if you’re interested)

SSDs (Solid State Drives) have no moving parts which makes them resilient to knocks, fast and power efficient – exactly what you need in a laptop. The following post has some photos of the install (it was about as painless as you could hope for) and a few observations on performance.

The first task is identifying your existing hard drive. On some laptops it will be in a cradle or slot – mine was just screwed into the base of the laptop.

Undoing the two screws for the cover reveals the internal hard drive cradle:

Gently pulling the hard drive away from the SATA connector reveals that the cradle is nothing more than a metal mounting plate. The marks indicate the 4 screws that hold the hard drive in place.

The new SSD is designed to be an exact replacement for a standard laptop hard drive, so all we do is unscrew the existing drive and replace it with the SSD (shown here)

After that reassembly takes about 30 seconds and voila – you now have an SSD enabled laptop!

Performance

So the big question – is it any faster? The answer to that is a resounding yes!

The standard hard drive in the machine is a relatively slow 5400 RPM Hitachi Travelstar model so these timings are based on that benchmark.

Booting up windows 7 beta went from 67 seconds to 34, so it roughly halved. There is a bit of leeway in those numbers, as defining what “booting up” means is tricky. I chose the time taken from pressing the power switch to seeing the fingerprint login prompt – the numbers do vary slightly when you repeat the process, but you won’t see it half in time on the same hard drive!

The more impressive performance gain though comes in general use. Typically after you’ve typed in your password and got a desktop Windows will spend an amount of time loading startup items – you can see the tray area growing as the apps are loaded. After the SSD was installed this time dropped to near instant – about 8-10 seconds from pressing return on the password prompt to having all my startup apps (including skype and anti-virus) loaded and functional.

The OpenOffice 3 launcher comes up in 5 seconds, loading or creating a document after that is a second or two.

Visual studio comes up in a couple of seconds – any software developers out there will recognise this as pretty fast. I’m fairly sure at least some of that delay was the pause for it to connect to the internet and load the news page – the actual application loading time is virtually instant.

So yes, I’m impressed. Was it worth the money though? It’s not a cheap upgrade option – at £132 for 64GB it’s about 4 times more expensive than a conventional laptop hard drive. The speed, ruggedness and power advantages are worth it to me – as usual, you’ll have to make your own value judgement.