question Which SSD should I buy for a laptop?

[apairofpcs]

I have two laptops:

• An Aug. 2009 Toshiba Satellite A505-6965 with Win 7 ( 64 bit ) Home Premium OS. It has an Hitachi 500 GB HDD ( a replacement under warranty ) with 118 GB occupied. The memory is 4 GB of DDR2-800 RAM. The CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 @ 2.00 GHz. The display adapter is an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series ( 1,366 x 768 resol. ).
• A Nov. 2012 Lenovo Thinkpad T530 with Win 7 ( 64 bit ) Home Premium OS. It has a Seagate 320 GB HDD with 76 GB occupied. The memory is 12 GB of DDR3-1,330 RAM. The CPU is an Intel Core i5-3210M @ 2.50 GHz. The display adapter is an integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 ( 1,600 x 900 resol. ).
  

Each HDD has a single partition. The Lenovo is noticeably faster than the Toshiba. I'm not sure which laptop should get the SSD and what capacity I should select. If the Toshiba, I'll have to swap the drives in the case. If the Lenovo, I can install the HDD or SSD in the removable tray that houses the DVD / CD drive. What are your recommendations? How do I ghost the data from the HDD to the SSD?

 

[Mercutio]

With the Thinkpad you can also install your SSD in the mSATA slot on the bottom of the laptop, though your mSATA drive selection is rather limited. I have a 240GB Crucial m4 in mine.
I actually do think 120GB is plenty for Windows and programs, but you'll need to know how to move data around to take advantage of Windows 7's Library functions. You'll also need to use a disk clone tool if you're attached to your current Windows install and programs.

My classroom machines have a mix of Intel 330-series drives and Samsung 830s and 840s, depending on what was cheap that day. Those are all solid choices. I do tend to avoid OCZ

 

[jtr1962]

I concur with Merc-get either a Samsung or an Intel SSD. As for capacity, 200 to 250 GB seems to be the sweet spot in terms of cost per GB. Cloning the SSD to match your installed hard drive should be relatively easy. When you remove the Hitachi from your machine, connect both it and your SSD to your desktop machine. Power on the machine as usual, and use a disk clone tool to clone the Hitachi. I think both Samsung and Intel SSDs come with disk clone tool but don't quote me on that. After that, install the SSD in your laptop, keep the Hitachi for either a spare or a backup drive. You can even get an enclosure for it and use it as an external USB drive.

 

[jtr1962]

On the question of which laptop to put it in, the older, slower one would probably benefit more but if you really want to go all out put an SSD in both. I'm totally sold on SSDs after having one in my new build. 15 seconds from POST to Windows 7 desktop!

 

[LiamC]

I have three Sandforce based drives, two in laptops similar to yours: Sony S Series 13" with i5 2410 (Win 7) and Dell Inspiron 6400 with T7200 (Core 2 Duo - Vista Home Basic).

OCZ did have some issues. I have a Vertex 3 (desktop) and Agility 3 in the Sony. The Agility 3 had a weird issue where it would pause at random for two or three minutes. Sometimes it was necessary to power to fix. Firmware 2.25 solved this issue about twelve months or more ago.

The Vertex 3 had a very old firmware and flashing it bricked the drive. The OCZ RMA process was painless (easily as good as Western Digital's). Since these issues the drives have been trouble free.

I also have a Patriot Pyro in the Dell. The issue with the Dell is that the BIOS is fixed with the drive in IDE mode. There is no way to select AHCI mode which (my understanding) enables higher performance. The speed up from moving from mechanical disk to SSD was noticeable, but not as big an improvement as I noticed with the newer laptop or the desktop. The Dell is also saddled with slow 667MHz DDR2 memory, so that may be a factor. In the Dell, I was also coming from one of the fastest mechanical drives. When booting, you can see the disk activity light flashing on and off. Previously, the disk light was continuously lit. This indicates that the system was processing the data being read off disk as fast as it was being read. Now, with the SSD, their are noticeable pauses, indicating that the SSD is giving the data to the system faster than it can process. The Patriot has been trouble free.

Subjectively, if you use either system for any length of time, an SSD is well worth the spend.