ssd Laptop's battery is dead. Should I upgrade to SSD?

[alvinRT]

My laptop's battery has been dead for a year now. I want to upgrade to an SSD. The problem is, the area where I live is prone to blackouts. Not frequent, maybe once a month. So should I just upgrade, or buy the battery first?

[manicottimuffin]

It depends on your use. If you're working on something important or gaming, power outages while using the machine are going to be a bigger deal than if you're just writing school papers or web browsing. While random power losses aren't good for the system, desktops are just as prone to losing power as your laptop would be without a battery, so you're no worse off than a desktop user would be. I'd say just go with an SSD first and make sure you save your work frequently or use something like Google's office suite that will autosave everything to the cloud. The one thing I would keep in mind is updates: you'll want to make SURE that you will have power for Windows updates, as losing power during an update has the power to corrupt your Windows files to the point of needing re-installation. It's pretty simple to recover your data off the drive if this happens, but it's a hassle and you'll probably have to reinstall programs, too (this is more of an issue with Windows machines, as Macs have the Internet Recovery utility built onto the board, allowing you to reinstall a clean copy of the OS over top of your current installation while retaining all data and programs).

[alvinRT]

5 hours ago, manicottimuffin said:

It depends on your use. If you're working on something important or gaming, power outages while using the machine are going to be a bigger deal than if you're just writing school papers or web browsing. While random power losses aren't good for the system, desktops are just as prone to losing power as your laptop would be without a battery, so you're no worse off than a desktop user would be. I'd say just go with an SSD first and make sure you save your work frequently or use something like Google's office suite that will autosave everything to the cloud. The one thing I would keep in mind is updates: you'll want to make SURE that you will have power for Windows updates, as losing power during an update has the power to corrupt your Windows files to the point of needing re-installation. It's pretty simple to recover your data off the drive if this happens, but it's a hassle and you'll probably have to reinstall programs, too (this is more of an issue with Windows machines, as Macs have the Internet Recovery utility built onto the board, allowing you to reinstall a clean copy of the OS over top of your current installation while retaining all data and programs).

I'm already using Google's office suite whenever I'm working on important stuff. My biggest concern is if the sudden power loss would have a worse effect on an SSD than it would on a mechanical harddrive.

[manicottimuffin]

1 hour ago, alvinRT said:

I'm already using Google's office suite whenever I'm working on important stuff. My biggest concern is if the sudden power loss would have a worse effect on an SSD than it would on a mechanical harddrive.

Yeah, it might. Since the drive ha does data by accessing it electrically, it could corrupt more data at one time than a mechanical drive, which would likely only corrupt the sector it is writing at the time. Check out this forum post, it’s probably more helpful than I am, ha. 

https://www.superuser.com/questions/1348647/how-vulnerable-are-ssds-to-power-failures-compared-to-hdds 

[Chiyawa]

Hi.

 

If I may, I would suggest you to go for a UPS if power outage is your concern. A cheap UPS could provide you enough time to save your files and safely shutdown your system.

 

Replacing laptop batteries may not be ideal, at least in my case, because with the price of getting an original battery for my laptop, I can buy a small cheap UPS that gives me enough time to shutdown before the battery is totally flat. I also use an external monitor so it actually helps me too as it has a two sockets. A plus side is many UPS, including cheap one, has Surge protection, so it can protect your system from sudden surge when the power is restored to a certain degree.

[alvinRT]

2 hours ago, manicottimuffin said:

Yeah, it might. Since the drive ha does data by accessing it electrically, it could corrupt more data at one time than a mechanical drive, which would likely only corrupt the sector it is writing at the time. Check out this forum post, it’s probably more helpful than I am, ha. 

https://www.superuser.com/questions/1348647/how-vulnerable-are-ssds-to-power-failures-compared-to-hdds 

Thanks for the link. I'll give it a read.

 

1 hour ago, Chiyawa said:

Hi.

 

If I may, I would suggest you to go for a UPS if power outage is your concern. A cheap UPS could provide you enough time to save your files and safely shutdown your system.

 

Replacing laptop batteries may not be ideal, at least in my case, because with the price of getting an original battery for my laptop, I can buy a small cheap UPS that gives me enough time to shutdown before the battery is totally flat. I also use an external monitor so it actually helps me too as it has a two sockets. A plus side is many UPS, including cheap one, has Surge protection, so it can protect your system from sudden surge when the power is restored to a certain degree.

Thanks for the advice. I'll look into it.