SSD drives… unbelievable performance.
March 14, 2011
It’s been a while since I’ve posted but life happens and kids keep me busy and I’m a little lazy about writing… okay, can’t think of any more excuses.
I’ve recently jumped into the solid state hard drive market (heretofore referred to as SSD drives). I have been reading the comprehensive Anandtech.com reviews and tests (which I recommend highly to anyone who isn’t intimidated by some really in-depth technical writing) and I’ve been wanting one for some time now. The biggest thing holding me back was the price. I’ve been waiting for them to fall under the $2 per Gig price point and it finally happened for me last month with mail-in rebates taken into account. I bought an OCZ Vertex 2 120Gig SSD from Newegg.ca and with the rebate the price, shipped and tax included was approx. $190.
The drive arrived and I installed it quickly. First impressions… man, are SATA drives in general ever a lot easier to install than in the old PATA IDE days. Mount the drive in an empty bay with 4 screws, connect a spare drive power connector which is keyed for zero chance of a mistake, and connect the keyed SATA cable for the same ease and lack of problems.
I then booted the computer with my Windows 7 install disk in the optical drive and installed Windows 7 amazingly quickly. I do a lot of re-installs for people who have thrown their hands up in frustration with a corrupted / infected computer so I’m well aware of how long it takes to install Windows on a standard SATA drive, install all the security updates and reinstall programs. Let’s just say that on a 2 year old Dell desktop computer with a Quad-core processor and 6Gig of system RAM the whole routine would have taken 4 or 5 hours if I really went at it and was monitoring the updates (those .net framework updates seem to take forever to install) and rebooting and launching Windows update immediately after every reboot. With an SSD drive installed the whole install, update and reinstall programs process took less than 2 hours! I could literally watch the progress bar move from start to end of the .net framework updates! Needless to say I’m thoroughly impressed with the performance of my new SSD drive.
The computer seems new and snappier to use as well. I can boot the system from a cold boot state and sit there, watch it boot and be using it within 30 seconds. Before the SSD I’d hit the power button walk away to do something else and then come back once the desktop was up and running. It got so I was leaving the computer on all the time just because I was too impatient to let the system boot to use it. Now I power it off all the time because restarting the system is so painless!
Now for the downside… it happened last night. My daughter was using the computer and asked me to look at it because “FIrefox wouldn’t start”. The cursor responded to the mouse and clicks seemed to happen onscreen but nothing would launch and neither ctrl-alt-esc nor ctrl-alt-del would do anything. I powered off the system by holding in the power button for a couple of seconds and then tried to power on the system. It just sat there at the Dell splash screen and then booted into Windows repair mode eventually telling me that Windows was unable to repair itself. I rebooted the system and entered the BIOS only to see that the SSD drive was not registering as installed in the system. I swapped SATA cables and tried different power connectors to no avail. The SSD was DOA! I called Newegg.ca customer service today and they gave me an RMA number and were excellent in general. I’ll definitely continue to look for deals on their site.
The courier just picked up the SSD and Newegg will be shipping me a replacement. If that drive fails then I’m not sure if I’ll be buying another OCZ drive but I’m not giving up on SSDs at all. Why? Because re-installing Windows 7 last night and doing all the updates and re-installing programs took me until after midnight on the standard SATA drive… I’m totally spoiled by the speed of the SSD and I don’t think I can go back to using a non-SSD system now…
I’ll keep you posted on how things go once the replacement drive arrives. Until then…
