Turbo Charge Your Laptop

If you've read my previous posts about setting up my own personal SAP system you may recall that I said that although it was functional it ran at a snails pace.

I had been somewhat disppointed with the performance of my Dell E6430 laptop since I bought it a few years ago. I was expecting pretty good performance since it had what was at the time a decent CPU, an Intel i7-3740QM CPU @ 2.70GHz with 8 logical cores and 16Gb of memory but it never seemed to run as well a some of the lower spec machines that my clients provided for me to use on their corporate networks.

I am just about to start a new contract engagement where I will need to use my own laptop and so I decided that it was time to upgrade the hard disk to a SSD Solid State Drive. After a bit of research I decided on the Crucial M300 1Tb drive, ordered it from Amazon yesterday along with a USB to SATA cable and it arrived this morning, total cost about £245.

Installation was a breeze, I downloaded the Acronis software which is used to copy an exact image of the old hard disk across to the new SDD which you just plug into a USB port using the USB/SATA cable. Once I started the copy process I went off for a round of golf and within 10 minutes of returning from the golf course I had the new SDD installed.

Wow what a difference !!

The virtual machine starts up from its saved state, with the SAP ABAP server running in about 20 seconds , at least 5 times faster. More impressively though the BPC screens in the Admin client load faster than they do on most of my clients production systems, whereas prior to the upgrade it was taking 30 to 60 seconds just to display the values of a single dimension

I bought a 1Tb drive because I have got various virtual machines running and the SAP systems need at least 100Gb each but a 500Gb drive costs only £130

These SSD upgrades are so easy to perform and the increase in performance is phenomenal - it's a no brainer.

Take a look at the video to see the performance for yourself