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Old 08-02-2019, 06:21 AM
cathalferris
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cathalferris is offline
 
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: Limerick, Ireland
Posts: 13
Regarding SSD upgrades to existing laptops and buying a laptop with a new SSD in it., please check the reviews for the exact model you are looking at, to make sure you are getting your money's worth. Some SSDs are properly slow and not worth the money. I've seen newer SSDs with utterly abysmal transfer rates.

The laptop I'm currently using for capture is a year-old Dell Latitude laptop with USB3 and 240Gb SSD, but the SSD is only ~250megabytes/second transfer at best and lots lower for random read/write. The manufacturer provided a dirt cheap device for Dell to include on the build so that Dell could tick the box. The performance figures are pretty poor for an SSD. I have spinning rust drives (WD Raptors) with faster throughput than that. I have a handful of SATA6 SSDs, ranging from Intel i520 120Gb through Sandisk Extreme 500Gb drives and they perform at the ~500megabyte/sec level for all workloads and are great for working with.

I've attached the i520 drive via a USB3 adapter to save capture streams to on that laptop even with the SSD system disk, otherwise I run the risk of slowdowns.

I've also used a Lenovo x220 as a capture laptop with a proper SSD with great success, but no USB3 on that laptop so when the ASI224 arrived I diverted another laptop of mine to capture duty.

In general, new build laptops with NVMe SSDs need to be looked at carefully to make sure you are getting what you expect.
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