ssd again
Community Forums/General Help/ssd again
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| Hi, had my Sony Vaio F (X) series (VPCF12MOE) for a few months and the HD is crap. We are talking 2 mins to boot. I'm thinking of puting in a Crucial C300 128Gb ssd. But have a question that maybe someone knows the answer to. I didn't get a Windows 7 CD as such. I had to create 3 DVD's for recovery as soon as I got the laptop. If I put in the ssd would these 3 discs install Windows 7, or would I have to buy a copy? I'm assuming it will fit, etc since I could have bought an F series with a ssd from sony. (320 quid for 120Gb) Thanks in advance Jim |
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| You _should_ be able to restore onto a blank new disk with those. |
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| When I bought an SSD drive for my laptop I got a hard disk cloning CD with it. I plugged the new SSD drive into a USB lead and then booted off the CD, teh software copied the existing drive onto the new supper SSD drive. I then swapped the drives over and booted up, everything worked fine. Assuming your SSD is not too much smaller than your old HD then it should work well. I think the software was called Acronis, it was very easy to use. |
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| If you don't have Acronis and you want a free solution, there's an almost exact clone of Acronis called EASEUS Todo Backup. Inside it's identical to Acronis, but they had to change the name for copyright stuff with whatever. http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm |
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| Looking at the user ratings of the free home version of EASEUS, one of the users claims that it does not allow you to clone a boot disk with that version, which would make it unusable in this scenario if true. |
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| Hi, thanks for the replies. The usb cable, is it just a standard usb to sata one? Jim |
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| Either use a USB -> SATA adapter, or alternatively you can (temporarily) put it inside a USB drive enclosure that already has an internal SATA connector. One potential catch with this is that some of the older drive cloning software may not recognize the SATA adapter in question, and may not be able to communicate with the external drive properly. |
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| I got it today OCZ Vertex 2. Managed to do a clean install with the 3 recovery discs. A lot faster, although I tried HD Tune Pro and my read speed averages about 110 Mbs. The drive is rated 275 Mbs. Old HD was 40Mbs. There are bugger all options in the 'sony' bios, so I'm guessing what I'm getting is what I'm getting. Is there maybe some firmware - from OCZ? All i got was an unformatted disc. Jim |
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| I also got a Vertex 2 recently to replace my OS drive in my main PC -- However, from what I've read OCZ recently had an overhaul of their production line from 34nm to 25nm or something, and while the new ones are cheaper to produce, they aren't as fast as the old ones were. the listed 285MB/s applies to the old revision, which happens to have the same model number. (If you got the 128GB model: the old ones will show up as 111GB in windows, the new ones as 107GB. There's a bunch of complaints about OCZ's bait-and-switch in the newegg reviews for this particular drive. Anyway, CrystaldiskMark shows 160MB/sec contiguous read on my Vertex 2, but only 80MB/sec write. (My old mechanical drive got about 110MB/sec on both) However, the SSD still feels noticably faster, and this is visible in the 4KB random reads and writes: on my old HD it got about 0.8MB/sec there, and the SSD scores 40MB/sec (no need to physically move a read/write head across a platter, after all) Windows experience index for the HD went from 5.9 to 7.1 for me, and the windows boot-up time is noticably less. |
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| I'm running a vertex 2 as my boot drive (60gb) on my Mac, boot time is ridiculous... Under 20 seconds from power button to computer staring at me, bored, wondering why it takes so long for me to move the mouse... And that's just os and apps, documents and user data are still on the standard hdd... it's like multiple processors, you just can't go back once you make the switch. I'll upgrade anything else in the future myself if needed, too big of an improvement to not do it once youve tried it. |
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| Hi, yes there is the Vertex 2 and Vertex 2E. I've definately got the 2E - it showed up as 107Gb at first. I've also checked the OCZ for parts number. I think Sony use a hidden partition, so I get about 100Gb. Although HD Tune Pro says 115Gb which is inline with what the OCZ website says for this drive. I'll give CrystaldiskMark a try. I'm happy with the drive, boot time is now <20secs. I think AVG slows things down a little. I'm upto 7.5 in windows experience. |
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| I tried CystalDiskMark and got 220 read but never more than 80 write. Most noticeable difference between HD and SSD seems to be small files - 20x faster no problem. Jim |
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| Interesting side note: With the SSD in place, ReadyBoost is automatically disabled since it states there wouldn't be a performance gain. |
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| If you set the 'test data' to all 0 or all 1 then I get read/writes up in the 250Mbs. Not real world but maybe that is how they can quote the figures. Jim |
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