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Upgrade Inspiron 9400 to SSD
Hello,
I want to upgrade the HDD of my Inspiron 9400 (MP061 with BIOS flashed to A09) to a SSD. I've got a few questions:
- Does this laptop have a SATAI-controller or a SATAII-controller?The SSD I want to buy can read up to 170 MB a second, which is more than the SATAI-limit of 150 MB a second.
- Currently my laptop has a Fujitsu MHV2080BH PL. Does anyone know the maximum read and write speeds of this drive? How many MB a second?
- I've read SSD are faster when AHCI is disabled. Is this true? Is my system faster when I disable AHCI? How do I disable this feature? In the BIOS (doe the BIOS of my laptop allow me to disable this feature?) or in the operating system?
- I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 with a EXT3 filesystem. Some people say EXT3 is bad for SSDs, because of its read and write operations every five seconds for EXT3 journaling. Some people say it's better to use EXT2, instead of EXT3. New features are always added to SSDs to increase their life span. How about using EXT3 on a SSD nowadays? How about EXT4 on a SSD? Is EXT4 even worse on a SSD than EXT3 or is it better?
I've also got a question about my memory:
I recently upgraded my RAM to 4 GB. The BIOS shows "Memory Installed: 4096 MB / Memory Available: 3327 MB". It also says "NOTE: Due to an amount of memory being assigned for system use, Memory Available is less than Memory Installed." The difference is more than 700 MB. When I had 2 GB in my system, the difference was only a few MB. Is this some kind of hardware limitation (chipset?) or is it possible to use 4 GB of RAM when changing some BIOS setting?
robbertvdd
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March 17th, 2009 14:00
Does anyone have an answer to my questions? I've already found out I've got a 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller. I've read the mobile versions of ICH7 don't support SATA-I speeds. Is this true? Isn't my controller able to run an SSD at SATA-II speeds? Will speeds be limited to 150 MB a second?
EmugeUSA
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September 16th, 2009 14:00
You will be limited to 150MB/s with the ICH7-M controller - this is applies to Inspiron 9400 and XPS M1710 (maybe other models too - but I don’t have that data).
With even the fastest SSDs I have only seen 120MB/s MAX 100MB/s average in real world use on these computers.
Still, I enjoy the power savings, reduced heat, silence and performance enough to recommend an SSD upgrade in both the 9400 and M1710. Since you don’t need the fastest SSD - I recommend you look for the best performance/cost/value MLC SSD with Indilix or Samsung controller.
robbertvdd
3 Posts
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October 1st, 2009 09:00
Finally I'm able to login again. The day EmugeUSA replied, I wanted to reply, but I lost my password. I choose to reset my password, I created a new password, but when trying to log in with this new created password, the login system still said the password was incorrect.
I already bought a SSD (OCZ Vertex) six months ago. In my opinion it's the best upgrade I've ever done. The system boots so much faster compared to the 5400 rpm hdd.
Today I've got an e-mail notification of another reply:
Maybe he already noticed I don't use Windows (because his reply is already deleted), but I want to add:
1) It has nothing to do with the operating system, as the BIOS shows 3327 MB, not the operating system.
2) When my SSD arrived, I wanted to upgrade to a 64-bit operating system, but I got an error there was no 64-bit CPU found. So, that must be the reason the BIOS shows there's only 3327 MB available: my laptop has got a 32-bit CPU.