My SSD

My SSD arrived Monday morning and I was pretty excited.  I spent the weekend researching it and how I should set it up.  First I tried to clone my old drive to the new one.  I didn’t see the performance gains I wanted to I ended up doing a clean install.  I needed to get my system back to Win7 anyways so this was the perfect opportunity.

Install was about 20 minutes which I think is pretty much normal for my system, so I don’t think there was much of a gain there.  Start up and shut down are looking pretty good though.  I love Vista’s sidebar so I always “hack” Win7 by adding the old sidebar because I like it on the side of my screen.  Now when I start up the sidebar and Trillian are pretty much instantaneous.  That impresses me quite a bit because on my old drives it would take about 30 seconds for the both of them to load up.  Reinstalling most of my software onto the system was a treat.  Files on the hard drive loaded fast and the install process for most programs took seconds!!

My verdict is uncertain.  I’m mixed at what to think of the drive.  While it is faster, I expected more especially when the drive cost $220.  As long as I get the $40 MIR that will make me feel better but I’m still left wondering if it is worth it?  The access time benchmarks show it is about 3x times faster than the 5400RPM drive I currently have as the second drive in my laptop.  I am in the process of moving my 7200RPM drive in here though and will do more benchmarks.  Programs load faster and I think it is saving me a little time.  I am happy with it and would recommend one only if you have the money to spend on one.  Even though I really don’t have the money, it was just finally time and I needed to get one.