The One with the Thoughts of Frans

SSD Performance in Modern Laptops

After acquiring a new laptop in October ’16, I was surprised to find how fast the old Intel Core 2 laptop still felt. To dig a little deeper, I decided to shoddily compare the performance of the first (SATA) SSD I ever bought back in 2010 to the (M2) SSD in my new 2016 ASUS UX305C. The old laptop did not feel faster than the new one as such, but between an ’09 AMD Phenom II and an Intel i7 there was a really noticeable speed increase on the same SSD. But this new laptop actually seemed to be slower at installing programs.

Obviously in 2016 and beyond I’d strongly consider upgrading to a larger model, but that it could also be worthwhile to upgrade for performance reasons saddens me. The write rate is particularly bad, and this can be felt in software installation taking longer than on the old laptop. NB The old laptop originally came with a significantly slower HDD, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that my old desktop SSD performed better… Still, I was expecting more. As long as it’s better than your average HDD I suppose I can’t complain.

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