[Nottingham] SSD upgrade

Martin martin at ml1.co.uk
Wed Jan 29 09:01:44 UTC 2014


On 28/01/14 08:38, Jason Irwin wrote:
> I'm looking to upgrade from a 500GB spinning rust unit to an SSD. Intel
> are over £400 and as good as they are, I don't need to fuss about power
> loss as this is in a laptop.
> 
> Kingston seems to trump Crucial for performance and capacity (I've not
> had an issue with the Kingston RAM I've bought in the past). Any other
> SSD makers? I'd need a 7mm unit.

Out of a multitude of different SSDs I have in use, the best one at the
moment for consistent good performance and price point that I can
recommend is:


128GB Toshiba HD5D, 2.5" SSD, SATA III Slim 7mm 6Gb/s, 19nm MLC-Flash,
Read 552MB/s, Write 502MB/s, 80,000 IOPS Max
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/128gb-toshiba-hd5d-25-ssd-sata-iii-slim-7mm-6gb-s-19nm-mlc-flash-read-552mb-s-write-502mb-s-80000-io

256GB Toshiba HD5D, 2.5" SSD, SATA III Slim 7mm 6Gb/s, 19nm MLC-Flash,
Read 552MB/s, Write 512MB/s, 90,000 IOPS Max
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/256gb-toshiba-hd5d-25-ssd-sata-iii-slim-7mm-6gb-s-19nm-mlc-flash-read-552mb-s-write-512mb-s-90000-io

For my systems at least, those give consistently lower latency than
certain others...


> And what about mSata? I could install a 120GB mSata drive, make it
> bootable and use that as a main drive, keeping the 500GB HDD for the
> 60GB Windows partition and stuff I don't need quickly (e.g. music or
> something). Other than capacity, are there downsides to mSata?

There's a Toshiba mSATA but I've never tried one of those formats:

256GB Toshiba THNSNH256GMCT4PAGA mSATA 19mn MLC 2.5" Int SSD 471mbps
read 450mbps write
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/256gb-toshiba-thnsnh256gmct4paga-msata-19mn-mlc-25-int-ssd-471mbps-read-450mbps-write

(Guess the rather old 8GB in my netbook doesn't count! :-P )

mSATA can sometimes be slower due to the less physical space meaning
fewer flash chips can be placed to run in parallel.

Check the reviews and tests...


> Mentioning Windows, if I replace the HDD; does anyone know if the
> Windows partition on there would boot when used as an external drive?
> Unfortunately I need to keep Windows for firmware updates etc.

?

You'll have to at least persuade Windows to accept other than "Drive C"
for its home partition... Boot loader adjust?... Chain it from GRUB?

The big question is whether Windows will accept a USB interface rather
than IDE/SATA for booting...?



Good luck,
Martin


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