I wanted to get more use out of my Vaio P, i just got tired of waiting on the load times for things and my iPad was just more handy. I was surprised how low these SSDs have gotten, it’s a special form factor designed for netbooks but it’s only a little bit more expensive then the SSD i bought for my desktop.
This one is made specifically for PC netbooks or Macbook Air Rev A, but work fine in my Vaio P. If you plan to upgrade keep in mind that you need a different one if your notebook came with an SSD from the factory, mine came with a hard-drive.
The dissassembly was surprisingly straight forward, it’s a little tight in the case and you have to keep track of all the tabs and screws but it’s manageable. The tricky part is getting it back together and all the tabs lined up. A quick tip, when you power everything back on, it might take you straight to bios, just save and exit and see if it’s detected, i went back in a second time when this happened, everything was tight, and when i booted same error, but once i saved and exited the bios it picked up the drive.
For the OS, i cloned my original with the included USB drive using Linux and dd. Both my Win7 and Linux partitions booted up fine but i had issues with my Snow Leopard partition not booting. I did a reinstall then a migration assistant to get all my files back up to date.
I only measured the load times for a few applications in OSX, but overall it’s much faster in all three operating systems. Times below are in seconds.
Application | Disk | SSD |
---|---|---|
Boot to Login | 74 | 41 |
Desktop | 63 | 35 |
Chrome | 23 | 9.5 |
Lightroom | 40 | 19 |
Word | 55 | 22 |