The Solid State Drive Laptop Upgrade – Is it Worth it?

In any recent laptop (or desktop), the mechanical hard drive is the component with the most detrimental effect on overall performance. This shouldn’t be surprising, as hard drive technology has remained more or less the same for decades.

Sure, some significant breakthroughs have been made and in regards to storage space and to an extent, read and write speeds, but the basic technology is the same as it was 30 years ago. The use of spinning platters inside a modern computer is almost an affront to the rest of the other, brand new high-end parts.

An SSD is fast, silent and on the whole a very tempting upgrade when you are configuring a laptop online–especially for the performance-hungry crowd looking for the perfect gaming laptop and won’t settle for anything but the latest and speediest tech.

That said, solid state drives are not a universal remedy for every aspect related to data storage. There are clearly some downsides as well, which we’ll discuss in the following paragraphs. But first a straightforward comparison.

Power Efficiency

What are the differences between these two types of storage? Actually, they are two completely different animals. A hard disk drive, as the name implies, use (almost) constantly spinning magnetic discs and a data retrieval head (think of it like an old turntable). A solid state drive on the other hand, and also as the name implies, has no moving parts whatsoever unless you count the electrons. It’s just a Flash memory modules and a controller soldered on a PCB.

HDD - SSD side-by-sideAs a result, no power is needed to keep those aforementioned platters spinning. Neither does it need to move those heads back and forth to read and write data, which resulting in lower power consumption. This is of course particularly beneficial for laptops, as you will save some much-needed minutes on the battery life. Laptop hard drives are fairly power-efficient already though, so the difference might not be noticeable in a high-end laptop during practical use.

Speed – 7,200rpm Vs. SSD

This is where a high-end SSD really makes a huge difference. You really can’t argue with the numbers: a SandForce SF-2200 based solid state drive such as the Corsair Force GT or OCZ Vertex 3 both reads and writes data at incredible speeds–around 500MB/s on both counts, consistently. Compare that to a comparatively fast 7,200rpm hard drive, which will typically max out at around 100MB/s, and that’s not a consistent drive speed. Due to its physical characteristics, it reads data faster on the outer edges of the platter and slower on the inner parts.

If you haven’t seen an SSD in action, you should know that this makes a difference that is very noticeable indeed. The operating system starts much faster, games and apps load considerably faster and the system feels much more responsive on the whole. It can actually make a dual-core low-voltage laptop “feel” faster than a high-end, quad-core gaming machine.

The improvements gained by going from a 5,400rpm hard drive to a 7,200rpm one is completely negligible compared to moving from any hard drive to a fast SSD.

What About the Downsides?

The most obvious disadvantage with a solid state drive over a regular laptop hard drive is the price. Another major weakness related to the first one is storage capacity. The price per GB of storage varies, but is often higher by a factor of 10. For most laptop buyers this means that upgrading a hard drive to an SSD with the same storage capacity is simply out of the question.

The alternative is usually settling for a lower-capacity SSD. This poses another problem for laptops, if they come with just one hard drive bay. On the other hand; if it has dual hard drive bays, as is often the case with larger gaming laptops, you can use a small and inexpensive SSD for the OS and your most commonly used apps and games and use a roomy hard drive for storing your videos, music and so on. Remember that a fast solid state drive, no matter what capacity, will outperform even dual hard drives in RAID 0. If your laptop has an option for an HDD/SSD combo, take it! You will not regret it.

If there’s only room for one drive, the choice is undeniably more difficult. You can always use an external USB hard drive for storage, but that’s another gadget that you don’t really want to carry around at all times. Whatever the alternative, it will be a compromise between capacity and performance.

Jesper Berg
Jesper Berg

Gaming hardware enthusiast since the 80286 era.

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