logo

One Week With The SSD

Last week I bought and installed an SSD drive in my 2 year old laptop, which I then put a fresh install of Windows on.

I've been using the SSD for a week now. Do I think it was worthwhile upgrading? Yes. And no.

There's no doubting it's faster now. To confirm this I just told the BIOS to boot from the old HDD (which is in a caddy where the DVD drive used to be) and it seemed to take an age to both boot and launch any programs. I'd forgotten what the spinning "wait" icon looked like.

What I didn't get at the beginning of the week was any kind of "wow factor". It's not so many times faster now that it's in any way amazing. The laptop wasn't ever slow enough for any single change to make this the case. So I'm not sure what I was expecting really.

Sorry this is so non-committal. If you were thinking of doing this and you're the kind of person who can't rest once an idea sets then I'd say do it. If you've not thought about it before then don't bother. Spend the money on more RAM or wait for SSD prices to come down.

Comments

    • avatar
    • palmi
    • Fri 18 Feb 2011 08:54 AM

    Thanks for that info - am looking to take my vife X60 and boosting it up in speed with SSD. BTW what happend to ASP.net ? you never did finish that :) or i canĀ“t find it

    1. I did this myself to my mac a little while ago. I've been meaning to blog it.. I'll try to do that soon - but I LOVE the SSD. it's a huge wow factor to me. Being able to start a VM in 12ish seconds compared to a LOT longer is simply amazing to me.

      I'm very happy with the SSD.

  1. Good to see that SSD isn't 42 (the answer to everything). I expect SSDs to have a greater impact on older machines, like a 5-6 year old laptop.

    • avatar
    • Erik Brooks
    • Fri 18 Feb 2011 09:55 AM

    SSD "wow" factor varies *wildly* by SSD. What SSD did you purchase?

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Fri 18 Feb 2011 10:00 AM

      A Crucial 256GB "Real SSD" C300

      Show the rest of this thread

  2. I'm a bit surprised. I also installed a 60GB Corsair SSD to launch Windows, Notes and Symphony and man it's fast. Starting Notes takes about 2secs, even firefox takes longer to start. I was really impressed and I'm glad I invested in the SSD instead of additional RAM.

Your Comments

Name:
E-mail:
(optional)
Website:
(optional)
Comment:


About This Page

Written by Jake Howlett on Fri 18 Feb 2011

Share This Page

# ( ) '

Comments

The most recent comments added:

Skip to the comments or add your own.

You can subscribe to an individual RSS feed of comments on this entry.

Let's Get Social


About This Website

CodeStore is all about web development. Concentrating on Lotus Domino, ASP.NET, Flex, SharePoint and all things internet.

Your host is Jake Howlett who runs his own web development company called Rockall Design and is always on the lookout for new and interesting work to do.

You can find me on Twitter and on Linked In.

Read more about this site »

Elsewhere

Here are the external links posted on the same day.

More links are available in the archive »

More Content