I have a Dell Latitude D520 1.6ghz, 4gb ram. I'm looking to postpone a laptop upgrade by getting one of the new Intel X25-M G2 SSDs.
Any thoughts or experiences on if such an upgrade will help? I know these things kill in benchmarks but on a laptop, I'm concerned there are other bottlenecks I'd quickly run into (for all I know, this lappy's sata controller--if it has one--can't push bits quickly enough for SSD to matter).
You will most absolutely and definitely and positively see an improvement. Laptop hard drives are usually the #1 bottleneck in a system. My Dell Latitude D420 came with a 4200RPM drive. Choke. Cough. Slow. Your D520 probably isn't as bad out of the box, but its drive is still likely an I/O bottleneck.
I installed an OCZ Vertex 250GB SSD in my other laptop, a Macbook, some time back, and it flew compared to the original 5400RPM drive.
These new SSDs are amazing compared to hard drives. But don't go cheap -- some SSDs can be slow. The OCZ Vertex I purchased is a good product, and so is the Intel you're referring to ... it would have been my other choice.
An SSD will provide a very notable performance improvement, particularly in boot times and application load times thanks to their amazingly fast random read performance.
The best information I've seen on the subject is from Anandtech. You can see it here:
You most likely will see an improvement. As you mentioned there are other bottlenecks, but the SSD will reduce latency to at least some degree. You may want to watch your power usage though, as SSDs tend to chew more power, which is an issue for laptops.
I'm writing this on a Dell 620, similar to yours with 2ghz cpu and 4gb RAM, to which I recently upgraded with a 80g X-25.
It is now lightening fast. I'm native booting to VHD and it is remarkably fast for this fairly old laptop. Boot time especially. Memory upgrade had made a noticeable difference a year ago but this is a step change in performance, like a new machine.
Most new ones should have the new firmware which addressed some problems, I ran their tool to find it already applied.
And for PCs, you probably know Joel recommends this too, with an interesting link to stats.
I found getting a cheap SATA dock very useful for accessing the old hard drive, which can now be used as an external hard drive now.
I just recently bit the bullet and bought an OCZ Agility 3 for my Dell Latitude 6520. It was worth the $200 investment. Visual Studio 2010 went from a ~50 second load time to ~10 seconds. Virtual PCs are tremendously more responsive.
I ran some benchmarks before and after. Windows Experience Level for Primary Hard Disk increased from 5.9 to 7.9. I also ran bench-marking software that was suggested to me from the Crucial page.
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/POST-YOUR-AS-SSD-BENCHMARK-SCORES-HERE/td-p/58420
After running it for 40 minutes, I aborted the benchmark on the HDD. Running all of the tests on the SSD took approx 3 minutes.
Comparison:
I couldn't give up the magnetic disk. Call me paranoid, but catastrophic SSD failure is not an option with all of my important data. Plus I was replacing a 300GB HHD with a 240GB SSD, so losing that extra 60GB would have been tough. I invested in a HD adapter for the media bay. I hardly ever use the DVD-ROM on my computer, so I took it out. You can find these cheap on eBay. They don't fit flush like your disk drive, but it works just fine.
Just bought SSD and put it in a D520 Dell. Max benchmark speed: 40 MB.s, average <20MB/s. Reason: Dell D520 has an IDE mode controller and even with latest BIOS update no AHCI/SATA mode option. That means that there is no TRIM or NCQ command.
Don't waste money on SSD for Dell D520. Otherwise SSD are a very good option, got one on my desktop an it's heaven, best thing I ever bought.
edit: got an intel chip SSD, which on other comps works great - just to be clear.