Tag Archives: laptop

HDD replace by SDD in old Dell 5520 laptop

Last year I have installed SSD in my old laptop Dell 5520. Idea was to get better performance, especially after upgrade to Windows 10. Even they say Windows 10 runs faster, but I don’t agree with that statement.

I started by comparing SSD models and prices. My final choice was between “Crucial MX200 2,5″ 250GB” and “Samsung 850 EVO 250GB”. Both hard drives cost (at date 2015-07-..) around 100 eur. Will 250 GB will be enough? For standard home user it is more than enough and I personally have bunch of external hard drives and one NAS running on my LAN.

Below is a video how to do the replacement of HDD in a laptop. If video will be not shown in the future, all Dell laptops are similar, so look for similar model. All replacement is pretty easy, even doing it for the first time.

If you are upgrading to Windows 10, like I am, at first do Windows upgrade and activate your Windows license. After that you will be safe to change your HDD and Windows license remains. As you maybe already have heard Windows 10 license is coupled with computer hardware configuration. So if too much hardware will change (like motherboard on a laptop), your license can stop working.

I also used some disk partition cloning tool, to copy all my data from HDD to SDD, so I didn’t need to reinstall Windows at all. System booted like a charm. All programs and files there in their places and Windows was up and running. It has saved me a lot of time, so my recommendation goes to “EaseUS Disk Copy Home”, because it is also free. Note: make sure you have less data in HDD than total SSD size, otherwise copying all data not fit. It is possible to copy single partition (for example, only C drive).

What does it feel running old laptop with SSD? I really felt boost of performance: Windows was starting and reacting faster, all software, apps and games were running faster, copying huge and small files was super super fast. Appreciable speed increase from laptop for me was at least 2x-3x times.

I have run benchmark tests before and after hard drive replacement, so I could show difference between old HDD and the new Samsung 850 EVO 250GB performance. By the way, the Dell 5520 has SATA II connection, which is still enough to reach maximum of SSD performance (540 MB/s sequential read and 520 MB/s sequential write).

Dell Inspiron 5520 + HDD performance (CrystalDiskMark)

Dell Inspiron 5520 + HDD performance (CrystalDiskMark)

Dell Inspiron 5520 + Samsung 850 EVO 250GB performance (CrystalDiskMark)

Dell Inspiron 5520 + Samsung 850 EVO 250GB performance (CrystalDiskMark)

If you look only at plain numbers, hard drive read\write speed increase varies from 6-398 times for read operations and 6-290 times for write operations. The biggest increase is for small size chunks copying. Even these numbers are already amazing, additionally SSD performs a lot more IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) than HDD.

It is really worth do such replacement if you only want faster computer, but you are satisfied with everything else on the machine. I have now already changed all my laptops to run with SSD and I am planning  to help my non-technical relatives to do the same. I don’t see a reason why I should spend money by buying new machine, while I can replace single part to extend computers lifetime.

Dell Latitude E6540 with AData Premier Pro SP900 SSD

It is almost end of the year, although Christmas starts earlier than usual for me. Just got a new laptop with SSD at my work. So I want to give you an impression how it feels to switch from 2 years old Dell Vostro 3560 with Windows 7 to Dell Latitude E6540 with SSD and Windows 8.1.

One of obvious differences is Windows version. From my feeling, Windows 8 is so so faster compared to older versions of Windows. When Windows 8 was in development stage I was actively following all the coming news directly from Microsoft developers. I have seen many greatness coming up. I can feel now the built-in improvements in the new laptop for sure: amazing start up time, sophisticated resources management and really fast UI responsiveness.

Of course, software can’t do much without good hardware. Software developers are used to have best class CPU and a lot of memory for everyday development tasks. I always thought that hard drive speed is not improving so fast as lets say CPU or GPU. Although it is not totally true, because hard drive size is constantly growing, but speeds are not decreasing. The typical HDD is usually 7200 rpm, has less or more cache available and an interface. I have even read somewhere, that technology used in HDD remains the same for the last 30 years. So you can’t expect too much, from the old man, right?

So I did this comparison on the old laptop running full of stuff vs. and the new one already pre-installed with most of my components for every day work: IIS, windows services, SQL server, etc.

Lets see some numbers now. Just check this benchmark HDD vs. SSD:

Vostro 3560 CrystalDiskMark WDC WD5000BPKT-75PK4T0Latitude E6540 CrystalDiskMark Premier Pro SP900If you compare only plain numbers, read speeds are 5x-268x times faster and write speeds are 3x-270x faster. Just amazing. Now cold start-up time of the machine is 15-20 seconds (till I can start clicking). Visual studio solutions compile times increased at least 2x-3x times. To open Visual studio takes less than 10s. For me, used to the old machine, these are really fast numbers. I can’t say how much performance is affected by the SSD in this case, but I believe it is a lot.

Old HDD was nothing special, just a standard model for consumers:

Vostro 3560 CrystalDiskInfo WDC WD5000BPKT-75PK4T0If somebody will be looking for more hardware details about E6540, I made several more print screens.

AData Premier Pro SP900 SSD:

Latitude E6540 CrystalDiskInfo Premier Pro SP900CPU:

Latitude E6540 CPU-Z Intel core i7 4900MQ

GPU:

Latitude E6540 GPU-Z AMD Radeon HD 8790MLatitude E6540 GPU-Z Inten HD graphics 4600Latitude E6540 HWinfo64

Happy coding!