Dell Inspiron 1520. Intel Pentium Dual T2370 1.73 GHz 4 GB RAM. I use a 750 GB HDD and am testing 1 TB HDD, Mint 18.0 Cinnamon 64bit on 750 GB Seagate ATA ST9750420AS HDD. Testing Mint 19 V2 Cinnamon 64bit on WD WD19JPLX-00MBPT0 WD BLACK. Mint 18 Takes 2 minutes from start to functional Desktop. Mint 19 Takes 8 minutes from start to functional desktop. How much faster would an SSD be on my laptop. I have the impression, not much faster as the bus would not be fast enough to take advantage of the SSD's speed. Hope I am wrong. Once either OS is up everything opens up and runs fast enough.

I have no statistical data, only gut feel. I have SSDs in all my systems except my FreeBSD package build server. Put one in the wife's MacBook Pro (2010) and brought it back to life. Put one in my brand new HP UltraBook and now it is a whole different machine. My workstation (on which I write this) is full SSD and (FreeBSD) boots in less than 30 seconds, roughly, just a guess. Takes longer for me to type my username and password, then "startx" than it does to boot.

They are fast, but it all really depends on what you need. They also (supposedly) have a shorter lifespan that spinning drives, but in all honesty, I have only had my current SSDs about 3 years. Time will tell on lifespan for me.

Boot time to me is really irrelevant. Who cares how long it takes to reboot on a personal workstation. Go get a sandwich or a beer while it boots. Servers, different story because there is a service down while the server is rebooting. App launch time is more important on a workstation. They do shorten app launch times, despite the bus shortcomings you mention. Again, no stats, only "feel".

My .02.

EDIT: 45 seconds at the "reboot" prompt and no, it doesn't take me 45 seconds to type my username and password

1 members found this post helpful.

Boot time is important if you are using a laptop, especially if you are away from home or work and are pressed for time.

A couple of years ago I dropped an SSD into a old asus/amd/athlon system and it made a great and positive difference all the way around. I kept it another year before finally replacing it with new, at the time, motherboard, cpu, etc.

A LOT!!!! I got ssd 2 distros, one distro on a ata 2nd'ary drive, it is slower booting, and login.

Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
HP8460p
CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2760QM CPU @ 2.40GHz

your
Intel Pentium Dual T2370 1.73 GHz
plus that is a 2008 processor, though, anything under 2GHz is slow anyways, but I bet you'd still see an improvement. Ebay deal might be your best bet.

How old was your system. My system dates to about 2007. Has dual pentium 64bit processor.

Which 'bus' are you talking about ? I looked it up and your machine uses Serial ATA-150 controllers rated at 150 MB/s which would slow a new SSD down as SATA III SSDs can do 500+ MB/s in read mode. It wouldn't be the PCIe network that slows your systems down as it would be faster than the SATA controllers of the same generation on a given MB.

The main advantage of a non-mechanical drive is very fast access times. At boot time with Linux you need to load thousands of files in different locations. A mechanical drive would be very slow for this. Your old laptop will limit peak transfer speed however you wouldn't have any mechanical delays.

Any SSD would therefore be much faster than a spinning drive even if you can't reach the maximum speed of the SSD. A new SATAIII 6GBps SSD will run slower in your machine however would boot faster than a mechanical drive.

You can look at the the output command systemd-analyze to see which process is taking the most time to start.

systemd-analyze blame

Can you hibernate or suspend the laptop?

systemd-analyze blame
43.348s apt-daily.service
13.473s vdr.service
12.502s apt-daily-upgrade.service
10.314s NetworkManager-wait-online.service
8.224s ModemManager.service
6.809s loadcpufreq.service
6.609s ntp.service
6.539s accounts-daemon.service
6.296s grub-common.service
6.072s dev-sda5.device
5.844s networking.service
5.647s irqbalance.service
5.451s ondemand.service
5.011s console-setup.service
4.968s speech-dispatcher.service
4.934s hddtemp.service
4.927s systemd-logind.service
4.581s systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-998...5e6c7b6.service
4.236s lm-sensors.service
4.218s avahi-daemon.service
4.205s bluetooth.service
4.187s systemd-user-sessions.service
4.167s rsyslog.service
4.111s console-kit-log-system-start.service
4.074s thermald.service
3.943s pppd-dns.service
2.861s NetworkManager.service
1.387s lvm2-monitor.service
1.200s systemd-udevd.service
1.127s keyboard-setup.service
1.103s polkitd.service
1.090s systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service
950ms colord.service
816ms systemd-modules-load.service
625ms systemd-journald.service
532ms systemd-rfkill.service
528ms upower.service
520ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service
488ms binfmt-support.service
410ms dev-disk-by\x2duuid-093409f7\x2df0af\x2d4c8f\x2da22c\x2d5a3b3816a364.swap
377ms systemd-random-seed.service
368ms systemd-udev-trigger.service
365ms home.mount
333ms dev-mqueue.mount
258ms user@1000.service
253ms udisks2.service
252ms kmod-static-nodes.service
246ms ufw.service
238ms systemd-remount-fs.service
232ms wpa_supplicant.service
227ms systemd-sysctl.service
217ms dns-clean.service
43.348s apt-daily.service
13.473s vdr.service
12.502s apt-daily-upgrade.service
10.314s NetworkManager-wait-online.service
8.224s ModemManager.service
6.809s loadcpufreq.service
6.609s ntp.service
6.539s accounts-daemon.service
6.296s grub-common.service
6.072s dev-sda5.device
5.844s networking.service
5.647s irqbalance.service
5.451s ondemand.service
5.011s console-setup.service
4.968s speech-dispatcher.service
4.934s hddtemp.service
4.927s systemd-logind.service
4.581s systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-998...5e6c7b6.service
4.236s lm-sensors.service
4.218s avahi-daemon.service
4.205s bluetooth.service
4.187s systemd-user-sessions.service
4.167s rsyslog.service
4.111s console-kit-log-system-start.service
4.074s thermald.service
3.943s pppd-dns.service
2.861s NetworkManager.service
1.387s lvm2-monitor.service
1.200s systemd-udevd.service
1.127s keyboard-setup.service
1.103s polkitd.service
1.090s systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service
950ms colord.service
816ms systemd-modules-load.service
625ms systemd-journald.service
532ms systemd-rfkill.service
528ms upower.service
520ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service
488ms binfmt-support.service
410ms dev-disk-by\x2duuid-093409f7\x2df0af\x2d4c8f\x2da22c\x2d5a3b3816a364.swap
377ms systemd-random-seed.service
368ms systemd-udev-trigger.service
365ms home.mount
333ms dev-mqueue.mount
258ms user@1000.service
253ms udisks2.service
252ms kmod-static-nodes.service
246ms ufw.service
238ms systemd-remount-fs.service
232ms wpa_supplicant.service
227ms systemd-sysctl.service
217ms dns-clean.service
201ms dev-hugepages.mount
173ms systemd-backlight@backlight:acpi_video0.service
165ms systemd-journal-flush.service
153ms cpufrequtils.service
107ms systemd-update-utmp.service
102ms console-kit-daemon.service
97ms plymouth-read-write.service
88ms sys-kernel-debug.mount
72ms alsa-restore.service
68ms resolvconf.service
65ms plymouth-quit.service
64ms openvpn.service
59ms plymouth-quit-wait.service
53ms proc-sys-fs-binfmt_misc.mount
34ms systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service
33ms setvtrgb.service
22ms systemd-update-utmp-runlevel.service
22ms rtkit-daemon.service
21ms plymouth-start.service
11ms sys-fs-fuse-connections.mount
8ms rc-local.service
8ms ureadahead-stop.service
6ms systemd-backlight@backlight:intel_backlight.service
lines 53-75/75 (END)

There are Suspend and Hibernate buttons at Menu > Quit

Looks like the apt-daily.service "bug" has been around awhile.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/8004...-daily-service

If you don't have a 4G modem connected or dial up you can disable ModemManager.service and pppd-dns.service which will also save a few seconds.

As others have mentioned, it depends on what you want to use this machine for?
Also, I learned earlier this year (the hard way) that not all SSDs are same. Some are designed to run 24*7 in datacenter environment and some are not (hence they are cheaper).

Good to know. Sometimes my laptop is on for days on end, and other times I am traveling with it and need it to boot quickly. I plan to get a cheap one just to play with, but want to get a good one for permanent use if ssd works for me. Who makes high quality ones? Crucial? - had good experience w/their RAM.

What I did was read the customer reviews at newegg.com. They have very good prices, but I haven't had much luck with mail order, so I checked the stores in my area and found exactly what I wanted and at a competitive price.
OTOH, a friend has had very good luck with newegg and buys all his hardware and software from them. Each to their own, I guess.

Prices have fallen quite a bit over the last two years.
Checking the previously mentioned customer reviews is very important, IMHO, as just because a company has a good rep for one product doesn't mean anything else they make is worth the money.

SSD is really good.
i have installed an SSD on my laptop and everything feels a lot faster.
4gb of RAM is fine if use just for watching videos and movies. If use for gaming I would highly recommend 8 or 12gb.
hope this will help you

No Gaming on my end.