SSD hard drives for laptops?

I'm looking for a speed boost for my year old dell inspiron 7000, mainly due to editing large photographs. It came with a 1tb 5400rpm drive.

What do I need to know about SSD drives? Reliability? Brands to avoid? What should I be looking for?

I've got my Mac set up with a dual drive system - an SSD as the boot and application drive, and a HDD for mass storage and user-created files. The speed difference is astounding compared to the HDD only.

SSDs have a limit on the number of read/write cycles. It may or may not be an issue depending on how you use your computer, but that's why I use mine for the more static job.

For editing photos, I'd think that RAM would be king.

The it guys at Amazon would only install the Samsung evo. These dudes were good. It's a bad ass drive.

I got an SSD upgrade on my work laptop, makes a HUGE difference in startup speed. Any file activities of course are much faster.

I upgraded my home computer boot drive with one (Samsung I believe). Drive comes with software to transfer over old drive, but not sure how you would do it with a laptop without an external enclosure. If you are rebuilding the computer, no worry of course.

I don't think the read / write reliability is an issue. The drives are pretty smart and will move things around when the sense issues and have built in safeties. You can set them up to be more failsafe or more storage.

As the IT guy at my job, I put SSDs in everything. The Samsung drives are the best and we haven't had a failure yet. We use the EVO series in desktops and laptops and the Pro series in servers and also put them in a video editing workstation. The difference is the warranty, slight speed difference, and rated number of writes.

When we can we go with the Samsung 950 M.2 drives. Its like a little card for the mini PCI.

I've tried some other brands over the years too. The only ones I had issues with were some Kingstons with a well documented fragile SATA connector and a batch of PNY drives that just stopped working after about 6 months.

They're massively quicker but also massively riskier - they can fail irrecoverably with zero warning, so make sure you take regular backups if you're going to run one.

Agree on the regular backups (which you should be taking anyway). I've had a couple earlier generation drives fail, the newer generations seem to hold up much better. That said, get a quality drive and not the cheapest one available.

Is there a performance difference between the Samsung EVO and Pro? The price point on the 512gb drives are right where I hoped to be and have enough capacity that I don't feel that I'll constantly be running out of room while still forcing me to clear the drive off often enough to be safe.

Another SSD convert here. My 5yo, garbage filled, tons of old programs shouldn't work laptop smokes my brand new I7 top of line work laptop. Beater got the SSD when OG HDD failed, Samsung 840 I believe.

My desktop is a dual disk with a 240 SSD and 1 gig working hard drive with 4 gig redundant back ups. One connected by USB 3.0, the other through the network router. I have lived through losing it all before, never again.

With the wear leveling software that's in SSDs these days, you really don't need to worry about write cycles. You'll never even get close the limit in any home machine. And yeah, Samsung is what I'd buy.

former520 wrote: Another SSD convert here. My 5yo, garbage filled, tons of old programs shouldn't work laptop smokes my brand new I7 top of line work laptop. Beater got the SSD when OG HDD failed, Samsung 840 I believe. My desktop is a dual disk with a 240 SSD and 1 gig working hard drive with 4 gig redundant back ups. One connected by USB 3.0, the other through the network router. I have lived through losing it all before, never again.

I assume you mean a 1TB working drive and 4TB redundant backups.

Right now my gaming PC is running dual 300GB 10krpm drives in RAID0, which seems to give similar load and boot times to an SSD. 1TB backup drive. To add speed and space, I'm going to move everything except the games to a 500GB SSD and then hardlink back to the games directory on the RAID0 array.

Ok, I think I'm going with the 5xxgb 850 Evo.

Like I said, I'm upgrading the RAM at the same time. Stupid question, but as long as it's the same type of chip as OEM (SODIMM DDR3L-1600) I can use any aftermarket brand correct? Going from 8gb to the max of 16gb, Dell Inspiron 7000 7458

Yeah pretty much. Very slight chance you might have a timing problem, you can compare the new vs. original memory timing to be sure. I was also looking at the Samsung Evo 850 for my gaming PC.

RAM capacity is actually less important on a computer with an SSD, since your swap is now so fast.

I thought the memory tech that went into the EVO wasn't as reliable, but slightly faster, than the Pro's from Samsung.

I put a Samsung 840 EVO in my older Mac laptop and it's been good for three years. In a Windows PC I built about a year ago I went with a Crucial. I don't think I'm missing real world performance that I would notice and I think the Crucial stuff may have been slightly more reliable at the time. The 840 EVO apparently had some issues and I don't know that I'd buy that again. I always thought that Intel had the best tech but quite high prices. This stuff is always changing, though, and I haven't paid attention since building my computer.

And I agree that more RAM would probably impact photo editing performance more than a change to an SDD. If you've maxed the RAM I would then goto an SDD, or if the HD is old and you're looking for some more life.

pres589 wrote: I thought the memory tech that went into the EVO wasn't as reliable, but slightly faster, than the Pro's from Samsung....

I can second this notion but wanted to clarify that the EVO isn't inferior per se. Some people work on very expensive data and need to know it won't fail during processing. Those people (like me) buy the PRO version to use in their workstations/servers as scratch disks (scratch = in progress storage space). If I were to upgrade my work desktop (not workstation; more day-to-day) or my operating system drive, I'd buy an EVO.

By the way, I haven't experienced any issues in my 2 TB 850 PRO SSD. It's power-on hours are exactly 1 year (creepy!) and in that time, it's had 50 power cycles and zero bad sectors. I only use it for "in progress" data storage and processing. All of my long-term stuff is instead stored in a 4 x 4 TB RAID 10 array with Hitachi drives. Everything is backed up nightly to a Synology in another room, and from there weekly to a server several miles away.

P.S.: Intel makes good drives too, but they're not as awesome. :P