Well... I'm one of those guys, everything must last until it falls apart, and with such behaviour, my precious laptop is now 5 1/2 years old, will turn 6 years in December 2010, and believe it or not, I'm not going to exchange it until it dies.

All this because about a month ago I decided to definatly upgrade its hardisk to something that makes sense, SSD.

I bought an OCZ Vertex 2 120Gb SDD for 300€ on pixmania, after mirroring the current hd XP installation into it, damn, the laptop does fly without hickups and even non hd operations are prety much faster, due to the simple fact of not having io wait on the HD for memory paging and stuff.

So, I guess, until something elese dies in this laptop, either board or lcd (i have spares for that to) it will last a few more years to come.

Its a VGN-S5HP with 2Gb ram and 120Gb SSD and a single core Pentium M 1.7Ghz.

This is as of today, by best electronics investment, I paid 2200Eur for it, since it came into my hands, it had 6 HD's, 2 of them died completly with bad sectors and electronics failure as this small thingie runs around 8 hours of hard computing per day, even video processing, image and audio runs into it, if fact, its my workhorse.

This was just a small review of something I have my hands on everyday, BTW, this keyboard its one of the best I touched (was a buying factor decision) so far, never had a single problem.

Funny, I was the first to own a <12'' screen at work, and everyone was calling me sissy with a girlie puter, my response is simple.. I carry 1.7Kgs plus other stuff everyday in backpack for quite a few hours per day (travel between parking lots and job, subway and stuff) and that does count when I reach 60 years old and their laptops were around 2.5 Kgs plus extras (cables, psu, tools) was were I work, we do have to carry lots of cables for terminals, network cables, adapters, external hd's and the list goes on and on.

I weighted my backpack today.. 18.5 Kgs of backpack...

BTW

It boots (after pressing power button) to password screen in around 25 seconds, after logging in, 45 seconds to come up all services, opens all of my regular apps in less than 10 seconds (firefox, chrome, outlook, secure crt (SSH and stuff), msn and skype.

Shutdown in around 30s with all open apps.

Weird, I lost standby and hibernation... no answer from sony, ocz and microsoft, the pc enters hibernation or standby but does not come up, it powers, loads the hibernation file and stucks at a black screen with the mouse moving (so, not really crashed) but does nothing after that, standby has the same behaviour. And I have no idea how to solve the thing.

cheers

regarding hybernation problem: i had same problem (S3 sleep only, regular sleep worked fine) but on Vista. Never found the solution.
/jealous @SSD. Ill have to wait a year prolly. Waiting till prices come down for at least 120GB for 100 euro

liger wrote:



With hdd's, never had any problems, in fact the vaio would stand for months without a clean reboot, only hibernation, only with the ssd standby and hibernation gone with the wind...

It will take more than a year for 120Gb to go down as 100€, and for my decision, getting another laptop for 1500 to 2000, spending 300 on an SDD that would solve all my problems, was the cheap solution.

I would really want the 500Gb SSD, but.. it still goes around 1700€ without taxes...

Considering u can have 128GB for $189 Id say there is a very good chance it will get down that fast

Found following, realy fast
First price - december 2008
Last price - august 2010

Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G1 mlc 80GB € 515 € 6,44 € 339,-
Mtron Mobi MSD-SATA3525-016 slc 16GB € 121 € 7,56 € 130,-
Mtron Mobi MSD-SATA3525-032 slc 32GB € 186 € 5,81 € 149,-
Mtron Pro MSP-SATA7525-032 slc 32GB € 442 € 13,81 € 479,-
Mtron Pro MSP-SATA7035-064 slc 64GB € 814 € 12,72 € 699,83
MemoRight MR25.2-032S slc 32GB € 506 € 15,81 n/a
MemoRight MR25.2-064S slc 64GB € 1086 € 16,97 € 682,05
OCZ Core V2 OCZSSD2-2C60G mlc 60GB € 196 € 3,27 n/a
OCZ Core V2 OCZSSD2-2C120G mlc 120GB € 335 € 2,79 € 199,90

Liger, there are several speeds and technologies available, if you want an ssd, even the low price one is ALOT faster than an HDD, but DS already had it problems with such, cheap ssd's may bring incompatiblity and slow write speeds (some even slower then an hdd)

This OCZ Vertex 2 really does 200Mb/s and today I really can say, HDD I/O is the thing the makes a puter crawl or lightning speed, i my case, this "small" investment does really pay, also, battery time just.. doubled , this vaio has a stock original battery, runs for two hours.

www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/0...buyers-guide/1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This is a good guide to get to grips with SSD's. The Intel and Sandforce controllers seem to be the best.

Tunes wrote:

yeh i know
i wasnt talking about the cheapest intel drives with 100 read/80write

anyway what gives the biggest boost isnt that they can read 200MB but the fact that they read small files all over the SDD at the same speed, where the HDD crawls to <1MB/s. That is why even the slowest SSD beats any other HDD in daily use.

PS: yes so far speedforce is the way to go
i prefer anandtech.com for hardware reviews When everyone was wondering why SSD's started sucking after being filled up, he explained it. In general very explanations and always goes in depth

BTW, this was the article driving my choice of SSD, I looked for cheaper bigger drives, 120Gb was my water level mark, after looking for the expensive drives, found this OCZ drive to fullfill my needs, although a bit more expensive.

www.anandtech.com/show/2899/3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The article is indeed good. Also a lot of info about SSD's

LOL

I have to laugh like hell on earth for this

The SSD died this morning... cool heh, 1 month of service.

However i've been using SSD's (mostly battery backed up huge amounts of DDR memory banks on pci-e cards), looks like nand flash shit has a lot to evolve yet...

However, I've just rma'ded the thing and will get a new HDD (damn.. not againzzzzzzzzzzzzzz), when it comes around again, I will use it again, I'll try to believe is a production problem and not really a technology problem... I just hope so...

Tunes wrote:


gutted was such a win upgrade for you old machine, was impressed it did so much