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  1. Obvious it would be great to have an SSD, but I've noticed in the higher end i5 and i7 laptops, the performance with a regular hard drive is still pretty fast. Could this be due to there not being too much stored on the demo comps?
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    You're comparing an electromechanical system to a purely electronic one. Frak, there's just no compison.
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  4. Do you need it? Strictly speaking, no. But once you've used an SSD for a while as your OS drive, I guarantee you'll notice the speed difference when you have to use a computer with a mechanical hard drive. Besides which, laptop (non-SSD) drives are slower than most desktop drives. I find the difference in program load times and overall responsiveness to be almost painful, but others will disagree.
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  5. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    A laptop or any PC will be about the fastest when it's new, before many programs are added. Although it may actually speed up a bit more if you remove the factory installed trialware right after you take it home. I have several SSDs in my desktop PCs. While they boot much faster than the ones with hard drives, I don't see much of a change in actual program operation.

    One downside to a SSD in a laptop is storage size vs price. My current lower end laptop has a 600GB HHD. I couldn't afford a similar size SSD for it. But the larger SSDs are getting cheaper. I see 480GB SSDs for about $350US. That's reasonable for a higher end laptop that can run a couple of thousand dollars.
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    The high end of laptops usually have two drives. A SSD for OS and programs and a large SATA hard drive for data storage. Some laptops will even have 2 or 3 ssd's in raid 0 configuration for even faster bandwidth. These are card type SSD's instead of 2.5" drive which take up more space.

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  7. Boot time and program load time will be significantly faster with an SSD. But CPU intensive programs, like video encoders, will not see much difference as long as you have enough DRAM.
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    personally, i find ssd's to be over-rated. sure boot times are somewhat faster when compared to a 7200rpm drive but as are load times of apps, especially if you needed to load large files into something like photoshop, but the reality is that for the money you pay for a 120gb ssd you can get a 256gb 10k rpm hdd, which is for all practical purposes equally as fast AND since it's enterprise grade, it will prove to be more reliable as well.

    it's really the price and capacity penalty the ssd's incur that makes them not such a great value.
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    Another thing to consider. SSD's use less power than HDD's. They also run cooler. If you use your laptop for extended periods on battery power, a SSD will allow for more time between charges.

    A_L
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  10. Member turk690's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by redwudz View Post
    ...Although it may actually speed up a bit more if you remove the factory installed trialware right after you take it home...
    In my experience this factor has more influence in boot and seek speeds in a laptop PC over whether a conventional HDD or SSD is used. I usually make DVD-R copies of an *.ISO of the manufacturer's partition on a new laptop, necessary for replacing an existing HDD with an SSD. The image may or may not contain the manufacturer's trash- and bloatware for that particular laptop, which may or may not automatically also be installed on the SSD; vigilance in installation is required.
    SSDs are often (much) smaller in size than the HDDs they replace; storing lots of user files is not very realistic. In fact in an ideal scenario, after OS and programs are installed, an SSD should be left alone, with writing new data to it held to a minimum.
    This almost always means a separate HDD is needed for pagefile.sys and all of user files that will be generated and ingested into the laptop.
    Laptop users who fully realize what all these details mean and who, for reasons of portability just want to absolutely have only one drive, just leave the existing HDD alone.
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  11. I understand the difference between SSD and regular hard drive as I already have an SSD.

    I was just curious since the factory settings seemed fast, again I know there isn't that many programs on there thats why I asked the question, obviously it would slow down when I install programs.

    Another question, how well do those ssd cache drives work in comparison to a regular ssd? What I mean is some comps have a regular hdd + 32gb of ssd cache.
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