SSD - that's just awesome....

arad85

arad85

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Andy
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So... I have an SSD in my main desktop (on 24/7 and reasonably performant) and SSDs in the media centres (not optimised for speed, just noise) and I have a decent laptop (i7-2630QM). Whilst I've been happy with processing performance, I've always beena little suspect about responsiveness. It has 8G of memory in, so is normally fine once programs are loaded, but it can be sluggish when interacting with the disk.

I decided it was time to try an SSD in place, so I sprung (the not inconsiderable sum of) £270 for a 256GB Corsair Performance Pro SSD. This was to replace a WD Scorpio Black 750G 7200rpm HDD (so a reasonably performant laptop HDD). As far as I could find, the Corsair is a bit of a panther when it comes to performance. It certainly appears to be from the responsiveness now. Everything that needs disk access is so much snappier - it feels like a massive CPU performance improvement.

Ms arad85 is very impressed given she uses the laptop 90% of the time (which is better than yesterday when she was questioning my sanity on spending the money on the SSD)
 
Is the smile on your face as big as the one you had when you first got broadband?? :)
 
No.. It's making me want to upgrade the main machine to one too (I chose this disk purely on I/O performance).... Have to say I think the CPU fan is running quieter too as it has less heat to dissipate...
 
Actually, yes, I see what you mean. It's like going from 56k dialup to 512k BB. I can't do anything about the 4Mbit ADSL line we have here, but loading Chrome is sooo quick.

To put it in context, a complete reboot (from Start->Reboot to displaying the login page) is < 30 seconds. That includes the Dell BIOS POST of 5ish seconds and shutdown of 7 ish seconds. In fact, it's quicker to reboot than it is to resume from hibernate (!)

This is a machine that gets it's disk accessed a lot - it is used completely differently from my main PC.

And if you can put any faith in Windows Experience Index, my HDD score has gone from 5.9 to 7.9 (!) My main machine only gets to a WEI of 7.7 for its primary HDD :(
 
I put an SSD in an i3 laptop and the performance difference was staggering. I'd never go back to a HD now except for storage in a server or similar.
 
Yes SSDs are pretty awesome in terms of speed. Being able to boot an aging Macbook in around 10 seconds, and apps that have finished launching before the first bounce on the dock has even reached it's peek is pretty special, but...

The problem comes when SSDs fail. They don't fail gracefully like harddrives often do, i.e. with spinning rust you can often hear there's a problem, or you'll encounter slow downs, and then you can take action. However with SSDs the failure is sudden and total, with very very little chance of recovery, even by the pro recovery firms.

Of course you all have backups so this shouldn't be a great problem, but a few of my customers neglected backups based on the logic that an SSD has no moving parts, therefore what could go wrong? Oops.
 
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Having had an SSD (controller) fail twice on me I can only agree, make sure you at least have your important data backed up.
 
Having just got a new system with a SSD. I have installed only windows, CS5 and LR on the SSD. I have 2 image drives and 1 program drive plus a data drive for all saves.

My docs and all my personal windows folders have been transferred off C.

So if it fails I can just install a backup of C on new drive and off I go again.

C is backed up weekly as are the data and image drives.
 
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