upgrade - Will an SSD fit in this old Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop?

08
2014-07
  • geo909

    I have an old Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop. Although it's very old, it's more than enough for the job I want it to do. I would like to put a SSD into it, maybe something like this one.

    The motherboard is really old. Is there any chance that this won't work? Will I benefit from the the SSD speed?

    • Answers
  • zachzins

    According to the images here, it's just a normal laptop drive that can slide out of the side. So, yes, that drive would work.

    Without further information, I would wager to say that you would benefit from an SSD. I have seen many laptops that are a similar age running very smoothly, thanks to a shiny new SSD.

    One final note, I have seen better deals out there for SSD's. I just purchased a few 120GB SSD's for just shy of $70 each. I frequently check out Lifehacker Deals for SSD's, they always seem to have at least one on their list.

  • okias

    Your laptop has SATA drive, so any 2.5 drive will probably fit and work.

    Before you buy SSD drive, I'll recommend you to increase memory as much you can (at least 4G) to prevent swapping, which can rapidly decrease SSD lifetime.

    About performance - it depend on situation. You can see by checking HDD LED. When laptop react slow and LED lights up and you have enough free memory (check in Task Manager), then HDD is bottleneck and SSD will improve performance.

    In case your computer just swapping to HDD, extending RAM capacity should be enough.

  • Jarek

    Yes you will benefit changing drive to SSD despite older SATA controller. The key feature of SSD is very low access time in compare to HDDs, you should notice gain in performance especially on system boot and running apps. Although file copy transfer should also increase significantly.


    • Related Question

    windows 7 - Dell Inspiron 530 - SSD Worth it?
  • DrFredEdison

    I'm going to be upgrading my Dell Inspiron 530 (2.0 Ghz Intel Dual Core CPU, 3 GB RAM) to windows 7 soon, and rather than backup and reformat my existing drive, I'm planning on getting a 2nd drive to replace my current primary, and moving it to a secondary. Thus, this seems like an excellent time to get a solid-state drive, if its going to be worth it. As far as I can tell this machine has a SATA-I controller, and I'm unsure if I'll see a noticeable performance increase with an SSD without going to SATA-II.

    So I have a three part question here given all that:

    1. Will spending the money on a SSD be worth it if hook it into a SATA-I controller?

    2. Is it reasonable to upgrade the controller on this machine to a SATA-II controller?

    3. Given that this PC is kind of old to begin with, am I better off performance wise to just stick with a faster HDD?


    • Related Answers
  • brandon927

    1. yes, Intel X-25 for performance or OCZ Vertex for value.

    2. yes, altough not a necessity, the controller costs only $20.

    3. no, the SSD will outperform even the fastest platter HDD.

  • RockBow

    Spending on an SSD would definitely benefit; provided you rely too much on read/write operations like video editing, photoshop etc. read/writing large chunks of data would be beneficial..