SSD on laptop gives negligible performance gains.

[MiltyMilt]

Hello. I have an Acer Aspire 5517 laptop. The original hard drive was a 5400 rpm with a sata 1 connector. I recently bought a Kingston SNV425-S2 solid state drive, thinking it would perform at least somewhat better than the hdd. It didn't. I believe part of the problem may be that i'm using a sata 2 ssd in a sata 1 laptop, but i can't figure out why it isn't running the least bit faster. Any ideas?

 

[mikedt]

Hello. I have an Acer Aspire 5517 laptop. The original hard drive was a 5400 rpm with a sata 1 connector. I recently bought a Kingston SNV425-S2 solid state drive, thinking it would perform at least somewhat better than the hdd. It didn't. I believe part of the problem may be that i'm using a sata 2 ssd in a sata 1 laptop, but i can't figure out why it isn't running the least bit faster. Any ideas?

Most likely that is a bottleneck. But on the other hand, it all depends on what kind of performance increase you expect. The system may boot a bit faster and software should load a bit quicker in theory. A browser is only going to render a page as fast as your internet speed allows, and games are mostly dependant on CPU and GPU performance.

The Acer Aspire 5517 is not a particularly high performance laptop and is getting on a bit now...2009....AMD Athlon at 1.6 GHz and budget AMD Mobility Radeon shared memory graphics.

 

[MiltyMilt]

Thanks dude! BTW, this thread can be closed now.

 

[Speed Daemon]

As long as you remember that the only performance increase that a SSD drive can bring is to disk I/O, and you must actually do things that benefit from increased disk I/O to see the increase. You should see roughly a two-fold performance increase at minimum. Of course you're not going to see any increase after it's in RAM.

With 7200 RPM SATA HDs I typically see no more than a 50MB/s sustained transfer rate, and a lot less than that when I'm copying to/from USB2 or network attached storage. On paper, the SSD should be able to saturate a 140MB/s SATA1 interface. But IME the real world transfer rates rarely come close to the published rates. Still, you should see some increase.

 

[MiltyMilt]

I figured it out. I was, for some reason, comparing ubuntu minimal with lxde on the hdd to lubuntu on the ssd, lubuntu being significantly slower anyway. Also, I suppose I was mainly comparing by boot times, with lubuntu having a lot more to load.