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I bought this SSD for an 7 or 8 year old ‘project notebook’ that someone gave me a little over a year ago. I call it a ‘project notebook’ because it’s not something that I need day to day, but it’s something that I get to run Linux on that I add various improvements and tweaks over time to see what it can do. Before installing this SSD, I was running Ubuntu 9.04 on a 7200 rpm traditional hard drive with 512 MB of RAM. After installing the SSD, I decided to go with the 9.04 version of Xubuntu, and witnessed a big improvement in load times, but nothing overly dramatic. I think the PIII processor and slower bus hold the system back slightly, but I would definitely describe the system as having more “snap”. AbiWord and The Gimp both open in a second or two, OpenOffice’s word processor definitely opens far faster than the OS X version that I run on my Mac’s (but it has always been slow to load on OS X). The only ‘apples to apples’ comparison that I have is that Xubuntu runs at the same or slighter faster performance than the same type of configuration running in a virtual machine on either my MacBook or XP-based Dell notebook – so as far as I am concerned it has brought my ‘project notebook’ up to par with modern system for *basic* computing (web, email, word processing). I have not noticed any battery improvements to date, but the machine is whisper quiet – at least until the fan kicks on (which is not as often).

One last note, my ‘project system’ is a Dell Latitude C510 – which I only bring up to explain that the mounting holes on this drive are on the reverse side of traditional HDD’s that I have had in this system. This is only significant if you are mounting this in a notebook that has you secure the drive to a caddy-type door as Dell and Compaq does – basically the drive mounts upside down in this configuration and in my case would not make contact with the connector inside the system. I had to forgo mounting the drive to the door and just pushed the drive into the system until I could feed it make contact with the connector inside (hopefully I never need to take it out!).

Basically, if you can overlook the price and don’t have needs for large amounts of space on your system, I would say that this drive was a good investment for an older system. Most older notebooks typically have 20-30 GB PATA drives in them that run at 4200 rpm, and you are likely to see a large jump in performance with this in your system if making that upgrade.
Rating: 4 / 5