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.
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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 can´t find it
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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.
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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.
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SSD "wow" factor varies *wildly* by SSD. What SSD did you purchase?
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A Crucial 256GB "Real SSD" C300
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Did you get this based on the reviews at Tom's Hardware?
SSD was something I'd been "waiting for" to be more viable for ages and your article piqued my interest again, so I browsed over there for a quick investigation.
Also, where did you purchase it from?
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I did read a few reviews of it, but have trusted Crucial for all my RAM buying over the years, without any issues.
I bought it off Amazon which was about 25% cheaper than buying direct from Crucial, for reasons I cannot fathom.
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Its cheaper for them to bulk sale to vendors then to sale directly. It removes the overhead of shipping each small package and verifying that it makes it to its destination, servicing 10 customers rather than 1,000,000 is a much lower risk of messing up. We do the same thing in automotive.
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In that case they shouldn't sell direct for the sake of not annoying direct-buying customers. Imagine how annoyed you'd be if you bought from them direct and then saw it the day after on Amazon for 25% less. Seems an odd thing to do to me.
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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.
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