Solid State Drives Now an Option for Latitude D420 and D620 ATG Customers

re: Solid State Drives Now an Option for Latitude D420 and D620 ATG Customers

greg — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 09:28:28 GMT

Have two similar laptops, one with ssd, one with hdd. Outlook 2007 drags and takes the whole system with it. Will be getting rid of the laptop with the SSD- it is too difficult to use for me as outlook is a core program. freezes are intermittent, sometimes they are constant, sometimes not at all, but when they happen it can be very distracting as i can't switch between programs or do anything except wait.

MS has a bug report on it, but no information.

re: Solid State Drives Now an Option for Latitude D420 and D620 ATG Customers

Fabio — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:15:40 GMT

We had 5 Dell laptop with SSD using Outlook 2007 and about 2GB mailboxes. We have to turn cache mode off as the systems were freezing every few minutes. Of course employing this solution, while it makes the laptop perform well, it also makes this hw unsuitable for doing email offline while traveling. We stopped therfore ordering new SSD based units until MS and DELL will officially provide a roadmap with dates for a fix

re: Solid State Drives Now an Option for Latitude D420 and D620 ATG Customers

l.p. — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:47:53 GMT

There is a problem with Outlook and SSD drives. No question about it. I replaced the SSD with a sata and there are no problems at all. I installed on Vista and XP. I also tried with office 2003 and 2007 on both platforms. The results were always the same ( with large ost's).

Other than Outlook, this drive made the system noticealby quicker. Boot up for XP was 10 secs vs 20-30 secs. All applications open quicker and responded quicker. Too bad about Outlook. Hope the can correct the problem.

re: Solid State Drives Now an Option for Latitude D420 and D620 ATG Customers

George Kaiser — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:38:33 GMT

Latency of an SSD in Outlook cache mode is definitely a serious problem. Microsoft will have to fix it but it will likely be a long time. I fell in love with the 1.7# Toshiba but it is almost unusable when online through a VPN and I will have to revert to the heavier Lenovo with a HD.

re: Solid State Drives Now an Option for Latitude D420 and D620 ATG Customers

Kim — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:29:55 GMT

hey, i'm glad i'm not the only one to have experienced this. we have 4 qty D430 with SSD drives. 3 of which had users with mailboxes ranging from 2 - 5 GB which creates the cached OST file. the fourth user is a new employee with a relative small mailbox to start but i'm sure we'll be hearing from her soon as her mailbox size increases. at first we couldn't figure out the issue did the normal hardware diag, firmware and drivers patching and ended up rebuilding the laptops serveral times with XP pro. then it dawned on me that these were the similarities: outlook 2003 in cached mode with users who had rather large mailboxes. when outlook froze it would take the system along with it. it would take a while to come back online (i.e. even get task mgr to come up) as far as the comment from Schmagagled that it's highly unlikely an issue with SSD drives, can you comment on this: one user who had a c400 said system performance on this was faster than his upgraded D430. another user said the same thing when he compared his C640 against his upgraded D430. my option now is to beat up on Dell support. I'm glad I found this link.

re: Solid State Drives Now an Option for Latitude D420 and D620 ATG Customers

Tracy Esau — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:03:51 GMT

i guess taht would mean less weight and less battery consumption i guess??

re: Solid State Drives Now an Option for Latitude D420 and D620 ATG Customers

Eric — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:35:02 GMT

As an owner of a D430 w/ SSD drive I can tell you that Outlook cached mode suffers A LOT. I'm with an IT consulting firm and we've done testing with laptops where the only difference was the SSD drive vs. a traditional drive. With the SSD everything was faster except for Outlook. It has to do with how Outlook reads / writes to the OST file that the drive really doesn't like. We've had clients buy a bunch of laptops with SS drives only to exchange the drives for standard ATA drives.

re: Solid State Drives Now an Option for Latitude D420 and D620 ATG Customers

Schmagagled — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:10:18 GMT

Relating to the comment made by arywillis: Can you be more specific about the latency issue? And the "life" of the device (reads and writes) is managed by the software embedded in the disks controller circuitry, Dell has nothing to do with that. The software spreads the "wear" of the memory devices out so no one section receives more wear and tear than the others. All manufacturers of SSD devices have something similar.

Dave's comment relating to the D630 with a SSD and Outlook in cached mode. ? What? I'm not sure what great boot-up time, long battery life, yet an inability of Outlook to run in cached mode have to do with each other. There are so many different things that could make Outlook stall (I support 250 Latitude D620 users running Office 2003) that I can tell you that if you returned that D630 with the SSD because Outlook didn't work correctly it most likely had nothing to do with the SSD drive! Apples? Say hello to Oranges!

re: Solid State Drives Now an Option for Latitude D420 and D620 ATG Customers

Dave — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:08:18 GMT

We just sent back our try & buy Latitude 630 w/ SSD.

Boot up was great, battery life was great, trying to run Outlook in cached mode (outlook Anywhere) was terrible. The laptop frequently froze when Outlook was open. the drive light stayed on solidly for 1 - 6 minutes and did so constantly.

I spoke with Dell support but they were of little help and said they had no way of working on the Outlook issue. I was hoping that with Dell's ties to MS, we could work out the issue or at least verify that outlook in cached mode does not work well with SSD.

Anyway, we're back to SATA drives...

re: Solid State Drives Now an Option for Latitude D420 and D620 ATG Customers

arywillis — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:52:26 GMT

BTW, I have one of these units from Dell and I would NOT recommend it. They have a problem with latency with this drive they can't resolve.

To address the write limitation (which is true) Dell and others created a process to map the number of writes so as to spread out the writes across the entire device. This is suppose to maximize the life span of the Flash.