Swore by SSDs for old laptops until a friend swapped a 5400 RPM HDD into a 2010 ThinkPad and it actually felt snappier for daily use.

I was totally against spinning rust in anything made after 2010, but then I saw his X201 boot up and load Firefox in like 8 seconds with a clean Win 7 install, which makes me wonder if the SATA 2 bottleneck on those old machines really makes the SSD upgrade less of a slam dunk than we all think?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamesmason3d ago

SATA 2 caps out around 300MB/s, and a 5400RPM drive can do 100-120MB/s sequential, so for booting and basic tasks the gap isn't night and day. It's like putting racing tires on a golf cart, you're not getting the full benefit because the chassis is the bottleneck.

mila_mitchell3d ago

Haven't seen many people bring up random IOPS though... what's the real-world hit on boot times and app launches when you factor in those 5400RPM drives struggling with small random reads versus an SSD even on SATA 2? That's where the chassis bottleneck argument gets interesting I think.