Biggest difference I noticed in the laptop/netbook was battery life extension. Boot time is faster - but that's a nice-to-have not a need-to-have. Have not tried in a desktop yet - I have 300gb WD 10krpm VelociRaptor HDD in either RAID0 or RAID5 and they are VERY quick in that config... I think what I do is too write-intensive on the desktops to waste SSDs on them. I also don't care about power consumption in the desktops.
Was she under your hypnosis when she said that? I have an Intel 40GB SSD on my desktop and I didn't observe much advantage for my application. I have been thinking of pulling it out and put it on my HP laptop, which as an extra drive bay. But because HP has their OEM Win7 Home Premium built, putting a SSD there may mean I need to reinstall my own OS and all the apps. A small pain. I don't think 40GB is enough for my laptop's storage so I am keeping the platter drive. Here is my question: OS gods My 40GB SSD is currently attached to an i7-730 desktop as the C: drive, with Win7 Ultimate installed from the Microsoft CD. Can I take this SSD and put it on my laptop and use it as my C: drive without reinstalling the OS? I was afraid that there might be issues with the drivers already installed because my desktop and my laptop have different hardware (BIOS, controllers, video, etc..)? Or must I re-install Win7 once I mount the SSD on my laptop?
1. No, it actually is quite a lot snappier. 2. You normally cannot swap a drive from one machine and use it in another unless both machines have the same mobo and BIOS. However, there are "migration" programs so you don't have to reinstall everything.
As a real world example, downloading data from my various data providers, SSD reduced a day's update from around 5 minutes to about a minute (metastock format data). My scanning speed has also increased significantly too. Cheapest speed increase you can make for trading systems.
Speaking of data ports. Received this from Newegg concerning the flaw in my new build. Intel chipset. HOLD OFF on new sandy bridge stuff.................. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve you. Newegg has recently become aware of a design issue that is affecting recent models of Intel Sandy Bridge platform motherboards. We are working with Intel to identify the exact nature of this problem. As always, Newegg remains 100% committed to our customers' total satisfaction. In keeping with our commitment to our customers, we are extending the return period for your motherboard by 90 days or until replacements become available from the manufacturer, whichever is greater. Intel expects to have a new revision of the P67 & H67 chipsets out around April, at which point first-run motherboards with this issue will need to be physically replaced in affected systems. From a technical standpoint, the design issue can be bypassed fairly simply by not using the Serial ATA (SATA) ports that are affected. Your motherboardâs manual should identify your SATA ports by number, and at a minimum you should see ports 0-5 (6 ports in total) listed. Ports 0 and 1 are Sata Rev. III (6Gbps), and do not appear to be affected by this problem. Ports 2-5 are SATA Rev. II (3Gbps) and should not be used. For a thorough explanation of this hardware work-around, please refer to our video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJcE2alQPvY If you choose to use the hardware work-around option, there is no need to contact us at this time. We have your information on record and will email you as soon as the replacements become available. If you would like to discuss this with our tech community or read up on the latest updates, please visit our EggXpert forum: http://www.eggxpert.com/forums/thread/682006.aspx If none of the above options are suitable to your needs and you wish to return the board at this time for a full refund, please email us at intelsandybridge@newegg.com and include your sales order number so we can help you out with your return. If you have any concerns, please contact Newegg Customer Service for further information and assistance.
You will only notice a big difference switching from an HDD to an SDD if you use your hard drive a lot. This may seem like a big "duh" but really for most users you boot your system and then hard drive activity isn't that significant: loading a program into memory, saving a document, etc. As long as you have enough memory your system shouldn't be paging so any disk activity should be minimal and the differences between the hdd and sdd would not be that noticable. Of course if your use pattern does involve a lot of disk i/o then you will notice the difference I'm sure. I replaced the HDD with an SDD in my laptop a year ago and the biggest benefits for me are longer battery life, not having to worry about drive damage from moving it around while on and faster booting and hibernating. I built a new desktop with an SDD boot drive also a year ago and the benefits there were minimal, yes it boots faster but I don't reboot that machine very often.
you guys who are seeing massive speed increases with SSD drives need to (1) defrag your HDD more often, and (2) get a 10k rpm drive. with the price differential, you could have bought more RAM and seen a larger system performance gain
I recently went from a HDD based system to an SSD based one and apart from 30-40% faster boot times I notice the loading and saving of big files is notably faster. Loading and saving a 5 mb Excel file is 1-2 seconds now rather than waiting 3-4 seconds with my old system. Doesn't sound like much but working with a folder of a dozen files is much more pleasant on a daily basis.