I have a gaming laptop that has a dual core, 4gb's of ram, NVIDIA ® GeForce ® 8400M G 1,2 GPU with 256 MB of dedicated GDDR2 VRAM and up to 1 GB of TurboCache™1.90 ghz, and I haven't came across too many games I can't run decently. I had no idea that the solid state drives were out. So I'm thinking of buying this: Lexar EX16GB-431 16GB(SSD) from newegg. My question is about value. This card cost about $50 bucks for a side plug into my laptop. If I install, for example, Empire total war, on this solid state drive. Will it run that much smoother and faster or will it show no difference?
According to support in Lexar, the ExpressCard SSD has read/write speeds of 15MB/s read and 14-17MB/s write. Which is about 7-10x slower than a normal HD. If you're serious at SDD then look at the OCZ Vertex or G.Skill Titan Series. They offer good performance without breaking the bank.
The G.Skill is much faster, but you need to really see what your capacity will be... I know that I have filled up my 75GB (after formatting) harddrive on my laptop very quickly. I would probably go for at least a 125, though they are definitely more expensive.
I don't think you'll notice a giant difference in gaming performance. I run ETW on my laptop (XPS 1530) fine with a standard HDD. What OS are you running?
If the SSD is your primary drive Vista will suck up most of it. I think it uses 15GB-40GB depending on version. Throw in ETW and there goes another 11GB. Also I'm not sure if SSDs are "true" to their storage size. 64gb=64gb
I have an SSD as the primary drive in my desktop. The 64Gb shows as 56.3Gb in Vista (Home Premium), with Vista itself and core programs taking up 23Gb. TBH, you won't notice much difference unless you either RAID SSDs or are prepared to spend silly money on Intel X25s. Honestly, I think that graphics card is probably going to be your greatest bottleneck. Otherwise, should you go for an SSD, you'll need to do these tweaks: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=1896294&postcount=4
A fast storage solution like an SSD will give you better load times but will not effect in game performance. Your graphics card should be nice. You could probably do with upgrading your CPU though... if your notebook has easy access to it that is.
