MyDigitalSSD BP3 256GB mSATA SSD Review Discussion

[Jerry Jackson]

You'll have to check the support pages on each manufacturer's website for a full list but in general, all of the recent 14-inch and 15-inch Ultrabooks that come to mind have mSATA slots (like the 14" Lenovo IdeaPad U400, the 15" Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3, and the new HP 14" and 15" Sleekbooks and Ultrabooks).

Many of the 11"-to-13" Ultrabooks do use soldered SSDs although the HP Folio 13 and Dell XPS 13 both have mSATA slots if I recall correctly.

[Corbu']

Thanks Jerry. I was looking on the 13" category. A 512 SSD is expensive now but should be an easy upgrade next year so upgrade ability is a crucial factor. The Dell XPS 13 does look great but unfortunately it is 2nd gen Core and so is the Folio 13. Hopefully they will be upgraded soon.

[WaNaWe900]

It's worth it... just received it few weeks and set it as boot drive, 238GB after format should be enough I guess .. while another 2 bay for storage completely

[Forge]

If anyone's curious, it took 15 minutes for a fresh Win7 install. The trusty G-Shock told me installation started at 10:00PM and ended at just before 10:15. Technically it's probably more like 12 minutes, since I was doing the password and options set up.

(MSI GE60, Win7 x64 Home Premium, using a USB install)

[John Ratsey]

I discovered a few days ago that a firmware upgrade had been released some months ago which claims to give better write performance. It took me several attempts to get this to work (the WinPE route succeeded while the slave drive in another computer failed) and, as promised, the upgrade totally wiped the drive. Fortunately, I had made a complete image before doing the firmware upgrade.

This process highlighted to me how user-friendly the firmware upgrade for the Crucial m4 is in comparison. While backing up the drive is recommended by Crucial, I have done two firmware upgrades which were simply a matter of running a program in Windows, letting the computer reboot and run the update, then restarting to get back to Windows again.

John

[long2905]

I was reading this hoping I wont have to install any update and thankfully mine is already on 3.2. From your experience do you see any performance improvement?

[John Ratsey]

Benchmarks confirm the claimed improvements in write speeds but I haven't run anything which would confirm better performance in real-life usage but I felt that performance had dropped off during the past few months. In fact the reason I went looking for any firmware updates is that Windows was starting to report disk errors which it attributed to the Win32/Small.CA virus (research revealed that this was often a false alarm).

John