Hello Folks;
I have a 6-yr old Vaio VGN-FJ1S that I've recently 'upgraded' from the Toshiba HDD to a Crucial V4 SSD. My problem is that the performance is truly mediocre (see benchmark test in attached image). Everything from opening and closing directories, saving tiny single-layer Photoshop files to doing anything with Firefox results in minutes and minutes of waiting. Crucial assured me that this SSD was compatible with my laptop, but having complained to them about the performance they say that my Vaio may only be SATA 1-1.5, and will only give HDD-levels of performance with a SATA II SSD.
Yet rather than the 20x increase in performance promised, the performance is 20x WORSE than with my IDE HDD. Their suggestion is to update BIOS and chipset drivers, but I've had no luck finding these as the serial and model details find no match. Having a look inside Device Manager, it seems that my laptop is IDE/PATA, and may not be SATA at all. Is this likely to be the cause of the degraded performance? Can I simply not use an SSD with this model laptop? Can this chipset (and BIOS?) PATA status be remedied with the proper driver updates, or am I stuffed? I would really like to move from HDD for safety's sake, but I need a laptop that is usable. I have a stack of software on this setup that I can no longer replace, so I need to stick with this HDD and laptop model.
What to do? I'm still waiting on a support email response from Sony, but the word "estimate" came up after filling in the email form so suspect that nothing free will be coming here. Any authorities on this model care to chime-in with assistance please?
thanks,
Palaeo7
Message was edited by: palaeo7
Can''t seem to add a reply without "an error occurred -- try again later", so editing my original post.
Hello Bencogo, thank you for the welcome and the swift reply. The Toshiba is an 'MK8032GSX' (it also states 'HDD2D32 S ZKD1 T'), and having looked this up it seems to be a SATA 1.5. The drive fits fine, and in mechanical terms Crucial's statement of compatibility appears correct -- everything works, just with zero performance. This seems to accord with your assessment of chipset speed, and it would seem that I've been misadvised in terms of systems compatibility Just to make it crystal for me, am I correct in assuming that no amount of updated chipset drivers will rectify this 1.5 limitation? Given the appalling performance shown by the benchmarking, do you think that this is likely to be the cause of the crappy performance? I don't mind if it performs no better than a HDD (I simply want an SSD for mechanical peace of mind), but it performs substantially worse! Additional info: 2 GB RAM, correct settings for an SSD (policies, write-cache enabled, non-defrag, no block-moving etc.). In making these SSD-friendly adjustments, could I have inadvertently screwed things up myself? What on Earth can be causing a 0.2kbs 4k write speed? Is there a way to set the OS back to default values to see (I never had the space for XP System Restore, unfortunately)? I can't use vaio Recovery Utility as this just wipes the disk, leaving me with an OS and no progs or data. What might be good to do is a 'Repair Install of XP' (http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/how-to-fix-missing-or-corrupt-ntfssys-error-in-windows...), but I never got any boot disc with this laptop, so I don't know if I could buy another copy of XP Home and try with that (although I suspect that MS serial numbers would limit this). Groan!
cheers, P
Message was edited by: palaeo7
