Should I upgrade to an SSD on a 5 year old laptop?

[Tutac]

Hi everyone,

I've been watching linuses videos for as long as I remember. Been watching his videos lately about ssd's and other storages. I have a 5 year old laptop Asus K50IN with the following spec's:

- Intel pentium dual core 2.0ghz (T4200) 1mb of L2 cache

- 4gb of ram

- 250gb of hdd space 5400rpm

- nvidia gforce G102M with 512mb of dedicated vram

So even after watching some of Linuses videos I still can't decide if upgrading to an SSD would be a wise choice, or if it would matter that much since my cpu isn't that great.

Any suggestions?

P. S. I'm soon getting my first job as a help desk/technician and since I don't currently have enough money to buy myself a new machine, I wondered if upgrading the storage would prolongue my laptop for a little longer. Sry for my language if incorrect, I'm not an native English speaker.

[WoodenMarker]

Yes, it still makes a world of difference and can be moved to another system later down the road.

[Lotus]

Depends on what you're looking for. If the problem is that programs are taking too long to load, then yes an SSD will help. If the problem is that programs are slow even after opening and take forever to do work, then an SSD will not help. SSDs are only good for boot and load times.

[mark201200]

personally i wouldn't do that. it won't affect gaming/heavy tasks performance. it will just be faster at opening programs/booting

you can get a Seagate SSHD. they're relatively cheap, and get faster and faster everytime you use the pc (ssd caching)

[Tutac]

Thanks for the quick reply! I would need to know if my laptop supports TRIMM as it is crucial for a long SSD life. How can I check that?

And since I am on a tight budget, I was aiming for a 60 GB Kingston ssd. I might be able to go for a 100gb if I get a little more money.

[Tutac]

Since I've gotten so many replies, I want to say that I am very grateful for all of your suggestions

I've read that an SSHD would be a better choice. I have to look into that, the prices and availability in my town.

[WoodenMarker]

Thanks for the quick reply! I would need to know if my laptop supports TRIMM as it is crucial for a long SSD life. How can I check that?

And since I am on a tight budget, I was aiming for a 60 GB Kingston ssd. I might be able to go for a 100gb if I get a little more money.

It should generally be fine if you have the option to set the sata port as AHCI instead of IDE.

Since I've gotten so many replies, I want to say that I am very grateful for all of your suggestions

I've read that an SSHD would be a better choice. I have to look into that, the prices and availability in my town.

Sshd's are good that they are cheaper, have larger capacities and have some of the snappiness of a ssd. However, a 'pure' ssd solution is much snappier.

 

You need to quote a post or tag a member or else they won't get a notification you replied to them.

[Tutac]

Thank you all for your quick replies!

[Dimwitted]

@Tutac Actually, you would be far better to change your hdd to an equivalent size ssd. That allows you to keep all the drivers and assorted things from your hdd available. You will not see a massive performance difference since you only have Sata II on the machine but you'll increase the durability and the battery life going to a ssd. I would recommend a 256gb MX100. BTW, be careful with the sshd versions. Asus uses a caddy for all their drives and it is tight. Double check the thickness of any replacement drive before trying to replace it.

[Tutac]

I will read all the size info before buying any drive ofc. Thanks for telling me anyway!

[Tutac]

Yes, it still makes a world of difference and can be moved to another system later down the road.

  

Depends on what you're looking for. If the problem is that programs are taking too long to load, then yes an SSD will help. If the problem is that programs are slow even after opening and take forever to do work, then an SSD will not help. SSDs are only good for boot and load times.

  

personally i wouldn't do that. it won't affect gaming/heavy tasks performance. it will just be faster at opening programs/booting

you can get a Seagate SSHD. they're relatively cheap, and get faster and faster everytime you use the pc (ssd caching)

  

@Tutac Actually, you would be far better to change your hdd to an equivalent size ssd. That allows you to keep all the drivers and assorted things from your hdd available. You will not see a massive performance difference since you only have Sata II on the machine but you'll increase the durability and the battery life going to a ssd. I would recommend a 256gb MX100. BTW, be careful with the sshd versions. Asus uses a caddy for all their drives and it is tight. Double check the thickness of any replacement drive before trying to replace it.

Thank you all for all your suggestions so far! Much appreciated!

[WoodenMarker]

@Tutac Actually, you would be far better to change your hdd to an equivalent size ssd. That allows you to keep all the drivers and assorted things from your hdd available. You will not see a massive performance difference since you only have Sata II on the machine but you'll increase the durability and the battery life going to a ssd. I would recommend a 256gb MX100. BTW, be careful with the sshd versions. Asus uses a caddy for all their drives and it is tight. Double check the thickness of any replacement drive before trying to replace it.

Sata 3gb/s doesn't bottleneck random read speeds and random access times which are what makes a ssd feel snappy. The difference felt for system usability would be the same as it would be as with 6gb/s.

[Theo]

i put an ssd on my 8 year old SATA1 laptop, makes a world of a difference, its capped at 150mb/s but IOPS are much higher than what any sshd/hdd can do so it is extremely noticeable 

[ictdude1]

an ssd wont make a difference in performance it only affects the loading times

[WoodenMarker]

an ssd wont make a difference in performance it only affects the loading times

The snappiness and better usability of the system is the performance increase.

If you're referring to gaming, then yes--it doesn't usually affect gaming performance. 

[Jarsky]

Put a 120GB SSD in my old Asus K70IC. Can confirm, felt like a brand new laptop and generally much nicer to use. 

The main things that concern me with a laptop is quick to boot, quieter operation, runs slightly cooler, and overall snappiness.

 

I would recommend going with a hybrid drive like a WD Black2 or a Seagate SSHD.

[Tutac]

Put a 120GB SSD in my old Asus K70IC. Can confirm, felt like a brand new laptop and generally much nicer to use. 

The main things that concern me with a laptop is quick to boot, quieter operation, runs slightly cooler, and overall snappiness.

 

I would recommend going with a hybrid drive like a WD Black2 or a Seagate SSHD.

I see that your asus k70ic comes with three different CPU spec's. Might I ask, which spec's does your asus have?

[Tutac]

The snappiness and better usability of the system is the performance increase.

If you're referring to gaming, then yes--it doesn't usually affect gaming performance. 

I used to do gaming on it, but somewhere around 2013 I stopped because I couldn't go any lower on graphic details in the game menu (and even in the .ini text file or using "ultra low graphic mods from the net"). The fps is below 20 and isn't bearable any more.

But anyways, I used it for college purposes, essays, seminars, some programming, web design and so on. I've done quite of photo redoing in photoshop elements for my family business web shop. Took and cropped/redone a couple of thousand pictures on it throughout last 5 years. Also checking my daily e-mail, surfing the web (usually with a dozen tabs opened up at the same time), I like to load a lot of youtube videos and watch them one after another, as well as loading a bunch of wiki pages and do some research. 

I watch a dozen tv shows, and some movies usually in .mkv or HEVC format using bs player/divx player (480 or 720p, rarely in 1080p since the files are bigger and it's not THAT better picture quality on an 15.6 inch screen) . So you can see that there is a lot of data read/writes on the hdd. 

I used it primarily as a desktop replacement since it doesn't use up a lot of my desk space (home or when I was in college). Since I'll get a job soon as I stated above in previous post, I'm not sure should I keep using this machine a few more years or start actively saving some money for a new laptop. ("Yes I'm looking at you DELL XPS 13 from CES 2015 " ) or a macbook air (the 12'' rumored one), though the small screen would be really a downgrade from this 15.6 incher I use now.

[Tutac]

i put an ssd on my 8 year old SATA1 laptop, makes a world of a difference, its capped at 150mb/s but IOPS are much higher than what any sshd/hdd can do so it is extremely noticeable 

Your avatar is really disturbing btw.

[Jarsky]

I see that your asus k70ic comes with three different CPU spec's. Might I ask, which spec's does your asus have?

 

I had the T6600 with 4GB ram (upgraded to 6GB), GT220M with Wireless-N. 

I've got rid of that now for a Surface Pro 3  

[Theo]

Your avatar is really disturbing btw.

yolo

[Tutac]

yolo

Exactly, that's why you shouldn't do or believe absolutely everything you see on tv/net. You might hurt yourself