It seems I should give old technology a chance before it gets refurbished to a stranger to
have. Should a laptop from 2011 be able to use a ssd drive that is 2.5 inch? It has 8gb of
ram and it should be a good basic laptop for general use.
---
■ wcQWK 8.0

MATTHEW MUNSON wrote to All <=-

It seems I should give old technology a chance before it gets
refurbished to a stranger to have. Should a laptop from 2011 be
able to use a ssd drive that is 2.5 inch? It has 8gb of ram and
it should be a good basic laptop for general use. ---

Yes, assuming it currently has a 2.5" SATA mechanical HD, the SSD
drive will work fine. That would be an excellent laptop for
general use.



... If it walks out of your refrigerator, let it go.
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
■ Synchronet ■ Palantir BBS * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL

On 3/28/2020 8:48 AM, Gamgee wrote:

It seems I should give old technology a chance before it gets
refurbished to a stranger to have. Should a laptop from 2011 be
able to use a ssd drive that is 2.5 inch? It has 8gb of ram and
it should be a good basic laptop for general use. ---

Yes, assuming it currently has a 2.5" SATA mechanical HD, the SSD
drive will work fine. That would be an excellent laptop for
general use.

Agreed... an SSD would make a night and day difference and 2011 means
it's more likely to be accessible than more modern laptops for upgrades.
Would also see if you can go to 16gb of ram if that's a reasonable
upgrade, though 8gb should be fine for general use.

Might also consider a lighter chromium or linux distro depending on your needs.

--
Michael J. Ryan
tracker1 +o Roughneck BBS

---
þ Synchronet þ Roughneck BBS - coming back 2/2/20

MATTHEW MUNSON wrote to All <=-

It seems I should give old technology a chance before it gets
refurbished to a stranger to have. Should a laptop from 2011 be able to use a ssd drive that is 2.5 inch? It has 8gb of ram and it should be a good basic laptop for general use.

Most probably, depends on the laptop. What brand/model is it?

Whether a 2011 laptop would make the most of a modern SSD drive depends on
the laptop's SATA interface; some old Thinkpads used a SATA to PATA bridge, which limited the speed of the SATA interface throughput, but I think manufacturers were pretty much done by then and supporting SATA natively.

Another option if cost is an issue is a hybrid SATA drive. I bought a lot of them for laptops back then, and they made a big difference. It's a SATA
drive with a big (2-4GB) solid state cache. The drives boot up the same, but as they start caching data, the laptop pulls from the cache instead of the spinning drive and subsequent accesses are as flash speeds.




... The inconsistency principle
--- MultiMail/XT v0.52
■ Synchronet ■ realitycheckBBS -- http://realitycheckBBS.org

MATTHEW MUNSON wrote to All <=-

@MSGID: <5E7EEECE.16588.dove-hlp@vert.synchro.net>
It seems I should give old technology a chance before it gets
refurbished to a stranger to have. Should a laptop from 2011 be able to use a ssd drive that is 2.5 inch? It has 8gb of ram and it should be a good basic laptop for general use. ---
■ wcQWK 8.0

If it was originally designed to use a 2.5" SATA hard drive then you should be able to drop a SATA SSD in with no trouble. As far as the BIOS is concerned, it's a mass storage device. It doesn't care if it's a platter drive or solid state. The actual drive interface has been housed on the drive itself since the beginning of the IDE days.

-==*>Weatherman<*==-

... He does the work of 3 Men...Moe, Larry & Curly
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.49
■ Synchronet ■ The Lost Chord BBS - Cheyenne, WY

On 3/28/2020 4:32 AM, poindexter FORTRAN wrote:

Most probably, depends on the laptop. What brand/model is it?

Whether a 2011 laptop would make the most of a modern SSD drive depends on the laptop's SATA interface; some old Thinkpads used a SATA to PATA bridge, which limited the speed of the SATA interface throughput, but I think manufacturers were pretty much done by then and supporting SATA natively.

Even if it's a slower SATA2 interface, an SSD will just maximize that interface, likely a multiple faster than a spinning disk, especially one
from that time period.

Another option if cost is an issue is a hybrid SATA drive. I bought a lot of them for laptops back then, and they made a big difference. It's a SATA
drive with a big (2-4GB) solid state cache. The drives boot up the same, but as they start caching data, the laptop pulls from the cache instead of the spinning drive and subsequent accesses are as flash speeds.

Be experience was a bit different, I'd often fill/flush the SSD caching
layer and it slowed like a rock.. performance was unreliable to say the least... these days an actual SSD isn't much more than a spinning laptop disk... you can get 1TB for around $100 or so.

Okay, you can get laptop non-ssd's for half that... it's more than worth
it still imho.

--
Michael J. Ryan
tracker1 +o Roughneck BBS

---
þ Synchronet þ Roughneck BBS - coming back 2/2/20

Most probably, depends on the laptop. What brand/model is it?

Samsung RC512 laptop, it was a custom model for the Microsoft Store.

---
■ wcQWK 8.0