SSD for old Latitude D830

A repost for me from another thread:

Hopefully, my experience will be worthwhile for anyone pondering the merits of this in the future.

The HDD hard drive in my old (circa 2007) D830 went corrupt about a year ago followed by my own blunder while replacing the laptop's wireless card, which resulted in a dead motherboard.  I purchased a new computer, but I also opted to get the ol' D830 going again, just to see if I could.  I replaced the motherboard, upgraded to an SSD, upgraded my BIOS to the latest version through Dell's website, did a clean install with Vista, and fixed the wireless card.  The glitches in the old machine were gone, but I was still unhappy with the boot times.  I ran a few tests and it was still taking me more than a minute to get fully into windows with a clean install.  I realized I was still operating in "IDE" drivers, which hold the SSD performance back.  So, I switched to AHCI drivers by following these instructions:  http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?69682-Change-from-IDE-to-AHCI-after-Installation.  Still, I was still not getting the performance I expected.  I pretty much gave up on the computer ever performing to my expectation.

For some reason, I finally decided to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 on the old machine, and I must say that I am finally beyond extremely pleased with the results!  Windows 7 was the missing link.  I don't know if it's the combination of all of these things, or if Windows 7 alone is responsible for the dramatic increase in performance, but this is now an entirely new machine.  I had to go back and switch the drivers to AHCI again, and I wonder if I flubbed the switch to AHCI in Vista somehow.  I also modified some settings in Windows for SSD support as discussed below.  Now, almost everything in the "Windows Experience Index" under control panel shows increased performance.  I know that WEI is looked down upon by most computer people, but its very satisfying to see tangible results.  Here's how it worked out for me:

Original setup included a T9500 Core 2 Duo 2.6Ghz processor, 4GB RAM, 5400 rpm 160GB HDD (original equipment), Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit, & NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M Graphics Card (embedded in mobo - 256 MB dedicated video memory)

New setup included the same T9500 processory, 4GB RAM, OCZ Vertex 4 120GB SSD, Windows 7 Ultimate, NVS140M Graphics card

Windows Experience index scores

..............................Old   New
Processor              5.4    6.2
Memory (RAM)      5.0    6.2
Graphics                3.4    3.4
Gaming Grapics     4.4    5.2  
Primary Hard Disk  5.9    7.5

I also ran the "AS SSD" benchmarking tool, and got the following results:

............Read.................Write
Seq      248.96 MB/s     166.25 MB/s
4K        17.84 MB/s        37.55 MB/s
4K-64    442.06MB/s      115.56 MB/s 
Acc.time .195 ms            .104 ms

I have results for Vista as well, but cannot compare them directly because they were in "IDE" driver mode.  Strange because I remember changing to AHCI, and perhaps I changed back when I didn't notice a difference, or lost the change with another clean install of Vista.  I don't honestly remember.

Lastly, I can tell you that my new windows 7 boot time is a glaring improvement over the old Vista loading time.  I'm sure that both Win 7, and the SSD have something to do with this.  After the initial "Dell" BIOS boot screen, windows takes 24 seconds to completely load windows (the moment when the little wheel next to the cursor disappears).  I did time it with Vista, but never wrote the score down.  It was on the high side of 45 seconds, but it might have been more than a minute.

Now, I am absolutely not "doom and gloom" about the life expectancy of an SSD, as some others here have posted about.  I regularly backup my computers' images and can stomach the thought of an SSD being "written to death" somewhere between 3 and 30 years like all the posts above seem to indicate they will be, though I'm highly skeptical that they are so unreliable as some would have you believe.  However, I did tweak things a bit.  I did not follow this guide to the letter, but did the things I felt would not burden my use of the computer:  http://www.overclock.net/t/1133897/windows-7-ssd-tweaking-guide

I hope my experience helps someone else.  I'm unbelievably impressed with the old D830's speed and performance now.  It's definitely not comparable to new workhorses, but if I weren't doing heavy video editing on my alienware, it would more than meet my needs as a primary computer.

One interesting observation.  I believe I've found why I was back to IDE mode instead of using AHCI as normally recommended for SSDs.  Running the hard drive in AHCI causes a failure to wake from sleep mode.  Switching back to IDE results in successful waking.

Now, I never figured this out before, but I did reinstall the old Vista operating system a couple of weeks before I upgraded to Win7.  I knew there was a problem with sleep before, and that the reinstallation of Vista resulted in fixing that problem.  I guess when you completely reinstall the OS, BIOS settings must go back to default, and hence to SATA IDE mode again.

Some quick searching did not uncover a fix for the problem, but according to one thread in a forum I found, it may be that the computer automatically reverts to IDE mode when waking from a sleep, despite AHCI being properly selected in REGEDIT (start - 0) and BIOS (SATA AHCI).  If true, this is certainly a bug. Unless there is a fix for this, I will be forced to choose between degraded SSD performance or living without allowing the computer to go into sleep mode -- a bit disappointing.

Well, I bit the bullet a did a full clean install of Win7.  It didn't change the sleep problem, but for some reason the hard drive performance in the Window Experience index improved to a 7.6.  AS SSD confirms the improvement with better scores, though the improvement is negligible.  I've disabled sleep, and since this doesn't seem to be a common issue on the nets, I don't have any further troubleshooting ideas.  It's ok with me, though.  I'm really happy with the massive improvements switching to Win7 and going with an SSD has made in this old jalopy.  It feels better than my buddy's years newer Sony Vaio with a i3 processor.  So, if you've got a D830, use the computer for non-gaming low to moderate intensity tasks, and can live without the sleep function, I recommend the upgrade to an SSD, and really recommend an upgrade from Vista to Win7.

If you follow in my footsteps and happen to solve the sleep issue, please send a note my way.

Thanks,

Chris