Help with SSD purchase

[lsutiger]

Long time fan of Ubuntu. I am currently running 16.04. I am in the market to purchase an SSD drive.
Here are my computer specs (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215371)
My hard drive is a WD WD5000BPKT-00PK4T0, 7800rpm 16MB cache.
I currently get 105 MB/sec(avg) in buffered read from hdparm -tT. Write speed from dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output.img bs=8k count=256k is 153 MB/s
The SATA technology is SATAII which is 3.0 Gbps.
Sooo, with all of that information, do you think I would see considerable improvement in my laptop's response time if I bought a new SSD drive?
I am looking at the AData SP550(480GB) and the AData SU800(512GB).

Thanks!

[QIII]

You would likely see a significant improvement. Throughput might not be spectacular, but the reduction in seek, read and write time is impressive.

I had an old laptop with SATA. Even with that archaic protocol, it became a new machine with an SSD.

But as with all things, your mileage may vary.

Cheers!

[The Cog]

Agreed. I put an SSD in my underpowered laptop. It really is like a new machine, and boots faster than my desktop. Anything needing lots of CPU is as lethargic as ever, but things that involve disk reading such as booting, the pull-down menu behind the start button, starting applications etc are astonishingly fast. It's all about seek time.

[kurt18947]

+1 on SSD, particularly in portables. They're less prone to damage if jostled or dropped. Plus they go like a bat O:). I haven't seen the deals this Black Friday like I saw last year. I've read that supplies of NAND chips are tight and will remain so 'til March-April which may account for it. It's also gratifying that at least some Vendors (Toshiba/OCZ and Patriot that I know of) offer their SSD maintenance utilities for linux.

[davidhai]

same question with thread admin

[gordintoronto]

I put a Samsung 750 SSD (similar specs and price to your items) in my 7-year-old desktop, and I'm very happy with the result.

Rendering video still takes just as long, though. [smile]

[Bucky Ball]

Rendering video still takes just as long, though. [smile]

Chuck in 32Gb of RAM and cut your rendering time drastically. ;)

SSD turns old to new again. At least did for my laptop.

[JayKay3OOO]

Don't know if still following, but I love the Samsung 850 evo drives. I've only ever had about 260mb/sec max copying large files to it though on a sata 2 connection. Had it over a year. Had the 740 before that.

I've been warned off the cheaper drives though as they can be inferior and not much faster than a fast hard drive so be careful. I'd only buy kingston, intel, samsung or crucial and even kingston screwed up at one point and made their next gen slower.

My system has two wd 1TB 72k rpm drives as a striped raid so moving files around is never going to be stellar.

I have the 250GB version that is mainly just for the OS and applications. I've never found it to be slow. Other things like the internet speed or internal ethernet link run out of bandwidth long before the SSD.

I expect you know that the SSD only affects read and write times for applications. One of the main ones being the operating system so it will start faster and if your RAM gets low and it uses the swap file it will be quicker writing and reading that data from your SSD. People complain their I7 is slow when it was shipped with a 52k rpm mechanical hard drive. Your 4GB ram should be enough with Linux.

I would never switch to a mechanical hard drive as the main OS drive ever again. At work we upgraded 5 year old computers rather than junking them with kingston ssds and they were transformed. From staff actually logging in, making a drink and then coming back to the computer to the staff logging in and the computer at their desktop before they have their jackets off.

I still don't trust big SSDs yet and this is why I have my important data on mechanical drives and then the priceless data backed up from there.

[bearlake]

My Kingston ssd is more than 2 years old and have 1000's of hours on it.

Bought a few others since then and all are running great.

Would I but another? Of course.

[neothethird]

I really love the cheap but durable Samsung Evo SSDs. Not the fastest SSD around, but certainly a *lot* faster than any HDD. An SSD is a must-have in todays computing!

[kennster2]

From those options, I would recommend the AData SU800(512GB), it's a bit pricier, however it will help a lot.