When using a desktop or notebook getting a bit long in the tooth, upgrade paths traditionally look at the usual suspects; processors, memory, and graphics card. Depending on usage profile, one item, or all of those items could be upgraded to provide a boost.
Hard drives were typically looked at for storage alone. Things started to change with increases in storage mated to increases in speed. Seek times, increased RPM's, increased buffer sizes, all these advances and more led to a reduction in time to get to data. And while all were brilliant technical innovations, it wasn't till flash memory became available to consumers in commercially viable quantities and prices that we moved past incremental improvements.
Traditional hard drives have typically been heavy, loud, fragile on portable devices, hot, and depending on what you use, a source of power drain for your notebook. Solid State Drives (SSDs) changed that by providing a smaller package, no moving parts, reduced power draw, reduced heat, and improved durability, amongst other things. Great and tangible improvements, but the biggest improvement was in terms of raw speed.
And it is the manner of the speed that is most apparent. There is an immediacy experienced from the moment the system is powered on. Boot times are significantly improved, applications open faster, the system tends to runs smoother as it no longer waits for a spinning disk to be read. SSDs are not governed by RPM's and seek times in the way drives from previous generations were.
The pictures and videos below demonstrate the size differences between traditional hard-drives, regular SATA notebook drives, and SSDs. They also cover the ease of installation in some of the most popular Dell Latitude notebooks, and real-world usage with Office 2013 and a few Adobe applications. The Samsung EVO 840 drives were featured in the majority of the demonstrations, while the 850 Pro will be featured in a future video, going into a Precision M4800.
Samsung 840 EVO 500 GB Internal Upgrade Kit | |
Type | Solid state drive - internal |
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Capacity | 500 GB |
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NAND Flash Memory Type | Triple-level cell (TLC) |
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Form Factor | 2.5" |
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Interface | SATA 6Gb/s |
Internal Data Rate | 540 MBps (read) / 520 MBps (write) |
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4KB Random Read | 98000 IOPS |
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4KB Random Write | 90000 IOPS |
This first video compares regular, full-sized hard-drives to solid state drives, providing a visual indicator of overall size for users looking to replace drives in their desktops. The SATA drive shown is an older model, a 320 GB version. Newer models have terabytes of storage:
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This second video shows how easy it is to replace your hard drive in a Latitude 7440, covering the removal of the stock drive and the installation of the Samsung 840 EVO mentioned above:
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This last video shows how to replace your drive in an older Latitude 6330 (adding a Samsung EVO drive), and compares that system with a newer and faster Latitude 7xxx series notebook with a faster processor and memory, but with a standard SATA drive:
(Please visit the site to view this video)
Type | Solid state drive - internal |
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Capacity | 500 GB |
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NAND Flash Memory Type | Triple-level cell (TLC) |
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Form Factor | 2.5" |
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Interface | SATA 6Gb/s |