Laptop hard drive upgrade to SSD

[Raz316]

I've got a Thinkpad X60s and I believe that the bottle neck performance wise is the hard drive. I am considering upgrading it to an SSD and was wondering if anyone here has done the same and more importantly, did they notice a huge difference?

I believe it to be my hard drive because when running minecraft it struggled every time I moved to a new area and CPU usage is never maxxed out.

Ta

[young_one]

Ignoring if the HDD is the bottleneck, be careful when buying a Hard Drive for the Lenovo/IBM X series, a lot use either 1.8 inch drives or even 2.5 inch drives but only 9.5mm deep rather than the standard 12.5mm.

Edit - Having checked it appears the X60s uses standard 2.5 inch 12.5mm drives so you are fine.

[Raz316]

Thanks for the info Young One

[speardane]

I'd check the relative performances.

with a PCI-E SSD for my Asus EEE the improvement was remarkable - it's now very usable.
with an Intel SSD into my 4 year old Tosh (despite the old one being 5400 rpm) - no material improvement

[Raz316]

Thanks Speardane, I'll have to look at what specs my laptop is exactly and make a decision from there!

[bledd]

A cheaper upgrade would be a WD blue drive, they're awesome upgrades for older laptops

[ehhhhhhh]

if there's not enough budget to buy an SSD for friends/family then I always recommend the WD Black 2.5 line, 7200rpm, noticeably faster than any other laptop HDD

[Raz316]

Thanks you two

[DrATty]

If you haven't, check out 'write amplification' with respect to SSD drives. Their sequential read speeds are amazing but they can be quite slow reading small, widely distributed files, and when writing to disk. If you edit large video files, an SSD might improve performance but one might slow down other applications.
Remember too that they don't last forever.
Personally, I'd buy a fast mechanical drive.