Optimus Series: 13.3 - Installing SSD?

[grofit]

So I got the Optimus 13.3 a while ago and its great but the HD seems to often spend its time at 100% and trying to run even a simple VM on here grinds things to a halt. So I was thinking about removing the hybrid HD (Seagate 1tb hybrid drive) and just getting a 500gb SSD or something in its place, however I was just wondering if it was going to be as simple as just unplugging the current HD and putting the new one in, and what SATA standard is supported by the laptop.

So can anyone answer me:

- Is it SATA 1/2/3?
- Do I need to do anything other than unplug the current HD and plug the new one in? (i.e bios updates etc)
- I assume there is only enough room inside for 1 HD? (thats fine)

I know SSDs were on the purchase options so I am pretty confident the laptop supports them.

 

[ubuysa]

I would first want to know why the HDD is at 100% active time, that's not a normal situation and it's most likely not a problem with the drive either. If there is a disk I/O problem you might well find a new SSD just gets driven to 100% active time too.

Open up Windows Resource Monitor and in the Disk section click the header "Total (B/Sec)" to sort the processes in I/O rate order (each time you click it the sort order changes from ascending to descending, we want it descending). This will show those processes doing most disk I/Os at the top. What are those processes and what sort of response time are they getting? If they are non-Windows processes then end the tasks and see what happens to your disk activity.

It nay simply be that your HDD needs some cleanup and management. Most hard disks do not perform at all well if they are more than about 70% full, if yours is then copy off to an external drive those data items you rarely use, delete those data items you no longer need. Then perform a junk file cleanup, you can use the Windows Disk Cleanup tool for this but Ccleaner from http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner does a much better job (do not run the registry cleaner in Ccleaner - do not run any registry cleaners). FInally defragment your disk, you can use the Windows defragger to do that.

 

[grofit]

Hey,

I have CCleaner and it varies as to why its at 100%, its not ALL the time, but it happens more often than I would like. Currently I am using VMWare instances on the laptop quite often and just running a barebones windows instance with a few gb of memory and a single core kills the host system due to the HD usage. I currently have 1/4 free on the HD, its got 300gb (ish) free, it sometimes does it without the VM on though, and there is no anti virus scans happening, there is no major applications running. I have googled and googled on the subject but there is no solution that has worked, i.e turning off windows searching things etc.

If this was just a personal laptop I wouldnt mind so much but as I use it for work and it will quite often just not let me login because the HD is at 100% and it just refuses to do anything, this only gets this bad when I run a VM instance (1 core, 2gb ram, 100gb available HD), but it happens enough for me to lose time and get annoyed at it, and given its got an i7, 16gb ram, geforce 860m it shouldnt be this slow.

Whenever it has been at 100% for some seemingly unknown reason it is always a windows related process up top which cannot be shut down even as an admin (and it is a windows related service not spyware or some other thing). I have culled most of the startup things from the list and it still takes a while to boot (not that I mind as I generally sleep the laptop), but I have tried defragging to see if that helps, took a weekend to defrag and still wasnt any better.

 

[ubuysa]

Hey,

I have CCleaner and it varies as to why its at 100%, its not ALL the time, but it happens more often than I would like. Currently I am using VMWare instances on the laptop quite often and just running a barebones windows instance with a few gb of memory and a single core kills the host system due to the HD usage. I currently have 1/4 free on the HD, its got 300gb (ish) free, it sometimes does it without the VM on though, and there is no anti virus scans happening, there is no major applications running. I have googled and googled on the subject but there is no solution that has worked, i.e turning off windows searching things etc.

If this was just a personal laptop I wouldnt mind so much but as I use it for work and it will quite often just not let me login because the HD is at 100% and it just refuses to do anything, this only gets this bad when I run a VM instance (1 core, 2gb ram, 100gb available HD), but it happens enough for me to lose time and get annoyed at it, and given its got an i7, 16gb ram, geforce 860m it shouldnt be this slow.

Whenever it has been at 100% for some seemingly unknown reason it is always a windows related process up top which cannot be shut down even as an admin (and it is a windows related service not spyware or some other thing). I have culled most of the startup things from the list and it still takes a while to boot (not that I mind as I generally sleep the laptop), but I have tried defragging to see if that helps, took a weekend to defrag and still wasnt any better.

What Windows service is it and what sort of I/O rate does it have?

A weekend to defrag a 1TB drive is too long, perhaps it could be a drive issue? Have you run chkdsk on it recently? Open a command prompt and enter the command "chkdsk /r" (without the quotes). You'll have to reboot to get chkdsk to run so do so. This will fix any problems with the filesystsm and replace any bad sectors it finds.

 

[grofit]

I say a weekend, it was pretty much sat morning until sunday afternoon (overnight too), I was using defraggler for it too.

I was trying to find the name of it but its not popping up at the moment, its one of the windows file caching related things, if it happens again I will capture it for you and the bit-rate as I cannot remember what it was. I will run check disk overnight tonight and see if that helps, but given its a 5400rpm hybrid drive I am not expecting it to be amazing, is there any HD benchmarking stuff to see what sort of performance it has? as an SSD is going to improve performance however you look at it, even if there is another problem, so I would still like to find out the answers to my original questions while I try to diagnose if there is a problem with the HD or whatever.

 

[ubuysa]

- Is it SATA 1/2/3?

Almost certainly SATA III I'd have thought. If you have Speccy (get it from https://www.piriform.com/speccy) it will tell you the SATA version.

- Do I need to do anything other than unplug the current HD and plug the new one in? (i.e bios updates etc)

I very much doubt you need to change anything, it should just be a case of pulling out the HDD and plugging in the SSD. You'll have to reinstall Windows and the drivers of course. That might even sort out whatever is causing the high disk activity now...?

- I assume there is only enough room inside for 1 HD? (thats fine)

I don't know that laptop but since it's 13.3" I would expect only one drive bay.

 

[grofit]

Oh I do have Speccy, I got the pirisoft suite ages ago, will still run a chkdsk tonight and see if anything improves, thanks for the info!