Doing a little review here, I have an older Acer Laptop. It’s about 3 yrs+ old, and was one of the first dual core laptops on the market. When I bought it, I had to wait for about 9 weeks for it to come out. I have a docking station and I have very little trouble with it. I replaced the hard drive when I started a new job in 2010 and it’s done nothing but get slower since. I always noticed that when I was noticing the slow down, the Hard Drive (HD) light was lit solid.
So I’ve been eye-balling SSD drives. They seem quicker and the fact that there isn’t a spinning platter in a mobile device really sold it. After lots of research, I decided on the OCZ Technology SLD3-25SAT3-120G from Newegg via: Newegg.com
The disk looked very fast, was compatible with SATA2 and would last until I received my next laptop that will for sure have SATA3 in the next year or so. So after ordering the drive, I decided that I had WAY too much on my laptop to reload so a clone it was.
Review starts here:
I received my drive, unboxed the Newegg box, to find a sexy little package that was almost like an envelope. Opening the box I find this sexy little drive that was super light and was build decent enough:
This Looked semi-normal and not much to the outside. But of course I bought it for the insides. And don’t think if that “Warranty Void” sticker wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have opened it up.
On to the imaging.
Downloaded the latest Acronis, started a clone and when the clone finished, I shutdown my laptop, plugged in the new drive and started it back up, with a huge kid-like grin on my face.
First boot-up with the SLD3-25SAT3 was normal, lots of Hard Drive light activity and was able to boot straight into windows. For the search engines, I have to type this out: Acronis Clone works to SSD Drive and Windows 7.
Windows 7 boots up, I login, it says new hardware. I rebooted as requested.
Next startup. The next startup seemed much quicker, but I was pulled away for a second to chat with a co-worker, so maybe it wasn’t, hard telling. Logged into Windows, desktop pops up and once again says New Hardware found. 2nd Reboot on the way.
3rd start after cloning the drive with Acronis. The BIOS post starts, Windows flashes, and WHAM.. I’m at the login. Now let me explain a bit to you about this (Please read next section if you don’t care, there is a lot more that matters!). When I usually turn my laptop on, it takes somewhere between 2-4 minutes to get to the point where my fingerprint reader is working properly. If I want to login before that time, I had to actually type my password, then wait for what seems to be forever, for it to load Windows and my desktop. This was not the case, it was ready to roll.
So, I boot up fast, it looks good, I start working and “playing” to see if it’s any faster. And it was in so many ways, Outlook flying, desktop responsive, almost no HD flashing. Opening local PDF files that were pretty large was near instant.
YAY for me, new laptop…. Well…. Almost.
Going along about 15 minutes..> BSOD, Blue..Screen…Of….Death. Reboot and back we go. After analyzing the dump, it was for sure something HD related. I go home for the night and computer locked up when I return in the AM. Time to switch HD’s back or WTF.
So off to the Forums, and I hope if you have this issue, you may have found me here. I find where there is a newer firmware and even though they are unsure what causes random BSOD for different people, they suggest the upgrade.
Now here is the kicker:
You can not update the firmware of a Hard Drive you are using. You must either boot to a boot CD or load the firmware via a computer booted to another hard drive.
So, I finally found a boot ISO as I didn’t want to take my laptop apart again, I found via: Guide Latest version numbers for the Vertex3-Agility3-Solid3 drives
I personally downloaded the latest ISO, booted the computer and followed the prompts to update the firmware. It was successful and life is good.
I want to tell you what. After about a month of using this new drive, I’m not sure I could go back to a normal drive, at least on my older laptop. This thing flies and I’d put it up against most any laptop for most any daily activity that normal and power users do.
So my thought, 100% worth the $200 for the drive. (Period)
If you have a laptop that is decent, has SATA2 interface and just has a lot of hard drive activity, try this. Nice thing is that you can move this drive right into your new laptop, do a repair and you have one hell of a SATA3 processing machine.
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