[tomtom]

Decided to pimp up my laptop by treating it to a 128gb SSD. Kingston V100 jobbie. £150 pre vat increase.
Transferred over very easily, and it came with an external hdd enclosure so the old hdd becomes an extra external drive.

First impressions are that its smooth.. boot up is c.30-40% faster - its quieter - but the biggest impact is how long it takes for previosuly bloaty applications to load up. Outlook pops up in a second, and C#.net flies now as well. No idea on how it improves battery life/heat from laptop yet but at the moment I'm quietly impressed.

[slackline]

Try firing up all of your applications from your whole "Programs" menu (in 53 apps in 18 seconds)....

The defrag is ridiculously fast!

[Tris]

Decided to pimp up my laptop by treating it to a 128gb SSD. Kingston V100 jobbie. £150 pre vat increase.

Nice - I was looking at them the other day..

I 'm waiting for the 250/500gb external ones to come a bit... but then I reckon I would have to buy a USB 3.0 card (just so it felt right  )

[tomtom]

Yeah - its not revolutionised it, but word/ppt load up in less than a second etc.. and its quiet!! I figured £150 for 128gb is was about right to get one.. and the V100 has c300 thingys transfer rate rather than older ones that were c.100 wotsits per thingy... 

[tomtom]

#fail  just as well the old HDD is still fine... back to Kingston with it.... 

[slackline]

thats a bit shit, be interesting to hear what caused the failure, been thinking of getting a 60Gb SSD for running the OS on my main computer.

[tomtom]

  it worked fine last night.. Powered up this am and no bootable device was the error.. Old hdd working fine. A couple of minor files wouldn't back up last night.. Which happened before when the hdd failed so who knows. Just the faff of sending it back now..

[slackline]

Did you swap it over yourself?  Might be worth checking its connected properly.  I recently had my work computer die on me, wouldn't even boot the BIOS, turns out the "experts" in IT hadn't seated the RAM upgrade properly (they even called out a Viglen technician to tell them so  ).

[tomtom]

Yeah, installed fine. It's so tightly fitted in the laptop and he connector is super positive that it's not that. Plus it mirrored the old drive fine, then after installed it went through several power cycles/boots fine. Just nada this morning... I tried it in the external hdd enclosure that comes with the drve (so you can use your old drive as a backup external) and it was dead in that too.. #fail

[slackline]

Just a check really, the poorly seated RAM wasn't an issue on my desktop for about three months, regular (daily) power cycles, then all of a sudden...."computer says no" one morning.

[Tris]

Yeah, installed fine. It's so tightly fitted in the laptop and he connector is super positive that it's not that. Plus it mirrored the old drive fine, then after installed it went through several power cycles/boots fine. Just nada this morning... I tried it in the external hdd enclosure that comes with the drve (so you can use your old drive as a backup external) and it was dead in that too.. #fail

Can you listen to check if it is spinning up..............                                  oh wait 

/unhelpful sarcastic mode

What does  say?

TBH, this is really putting me off buying one - I know you are more than capable with this kind of shit... Out of interest, how many years warranty do you get?

With other big drive vendors, when you ring up to get it swapped out they will ask you to run some diags against it and give them a fault code. Don't know what the score is with Kinsgton..

[tomtom]

  says zip...

Can you listen to check if it is spinning up..............                                  oh wait 

/unhelpful sarcastic mode

What does  say?

TBH, this is really putting me off buying one - I know you are more than capable with this kind of shit... Out of interest, how many years warranty do you get?

With other big drive vendors, when you ring up to get it swapped out they will ask you to run some diags against it and give them a fault code. Don't know what the score is with Kinsgton..

It comes with 3 years warranty (apparently) and 24/7 tech support according to the box - which is at home, so I'm not tech supporting at the moment..

The fact it wasnt even recognised when it was in the external hdd enclosure suggests to me its (to use the technical term) 'well borked'.

[iain]

TBH, this is really putting me off buying one

Don't be, TomTom has hopefully just been unlucky. I've used a Samsung ssd for couple of years now without any problems and have recently changed to an OCZ which is also fine. They make such a difference to noise, battery life and speed I wouldn't do without one now 

Strange they did a defrag above, I thought they didn't need it.

[slackline]

Strange they did a defrag above, I thought they didn't need it.

Defraging is a feature of the file system and not the hardware (in my understanding).

[Tris]

TBH, this is really putting me off buying one

Don't be, TomTom has hopefully just been unlucky.

I meant a Kingston drive - I have got/used an SSD drive in my Asus EEE netbook for years, it is still running fine... 

[iain]

I meant a Kingston drive - I have got/used an SSD drive in my Asus EEE netbook for years, it is still running fine... 

 

Strange they did a defrag above, I thought they didn't need it.

Defraging is a feature of the file system and not the hardware (in my understanding).

Fragmentation is a feature of the file system but the need to defrag is apparently only necessary on normal platter hdds where there is latency to move between sectors if a file is spread over the disk. ssds don't have sectors as such and the time to read the next bit of the file is independent of where it is in the flash. Defragging can also reduce the life of flash memory because of the multiple read/writes
http://www.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/CS-029623.htm#5

ssds have their own issues around space management and access times but things like trim and wear levelling support help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling

However, having said all that whilst I was following your good example and hunting around for links to back my waffle up I came across the following which seems to say that trim and wear levelling are kind off like defragging anyway:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/ssd-onslaught-spotlights-defrag-debate.php

Who knows

[Jim]

just looking into this again and had a read of this recent article
http://www.hardware-revolution.com/best-ssds-hdds-for-your-money-march-2011/
will probably give it till the summer and get an ssd with a 2nd gen controller

[mr__j5]

Strange they did a defrag above, I thought they didn't need it.

Defraging is a feature of the file system and not the hardware (in my understanding).

ssds have their own issues around space management and access times but things like trim and wear levelling support help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling

However, having said all that whilst I was following your good example and hunting around for links to back my waffle up I came across the following which seems to say that trim and wear levelling are kind off like defragging anyway:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/ssd-onslaught-spotlights-defrag-debate.php

Who knows

That's basically it, but the thing that makes a difference is whether the OS is new enough to have logic to consider that your drive is an SSD or HDD.

Windows 7 is the only MS OS that does this, so if you put a SSD in Vista or older, then it will try and defrag it and also not use Trim when deleting files.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

[Jim]

anyone got a new ssd recently?
looking at getting a 40 gig Intel 320 series sata2 to run my os off. looks great value at just under 70 notes