| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Aaron Cake |
Posted - Oct 23 2009 : 11:11:13 AM
The old 5400 RPM 60 GB drive in my tablet was getting a bit clunky. It had increased in volume, and the heads were parking themselves during operation a lot more then usual. Additionally it was slow and always had been.
As the system was built just before the SATA switchover I figured I'd never find an IDE 2.5" SSD, but a few weeks ago I ran across some reviews of such a drive made by Transcend. They make 32, 64 and 128 GB MLC SSDs with an IDE interface. Unfortunately I couldn't buy one. All of the suppliers were either out of stock or wouldn't ship to Canada, so I finally bought from an eBay seller representing MWAVE.COM.
The drive arrived yesterday and I was in a big hurry to get it into the system. It came just in an envelope (with no mechanical parts, shock damage isn't an issue) and was very small and light compared to the old mechanical drive.
Cloning my data onto it was a bit of a problem, surprisingly. At first I put it on a USB adapter and used Acronis TrueImage to clone from the old drive. All the files moved over but the drive would not boot. I didn't bother trying to repair the boot sector, instead I just put both the original and SSD onto laptop to desktop IDE adapters and tried the clone again. Same result. How odd. So I fired up my old copy of Ghost 2003 and tried again, but stopped it about 10 percent of the way through when I saw the estimated 6 hours it would take (which was increasing).
It was about time to leave work, so I packed up everything and went home. When I got home, I started up TrueImage and began making an image to a network drive. When that finished (2 hours later) I pulled out the mechanical drive, popped in the SSD and then dumped the image from the network to the new drive.
Finally, success! Windows began booting and before I knew it I was looking at a login prompt. I was unplugging the USB CDROM I was using and by the time I had unplugged the USB and power cable, Windows was booted.
I must say the difference in performance is dramatic. With the old drive, from power on to a "usable" Windows desktop was approximately 7 minutes. With the SSD, I see a login prompt about 20 seconds after the system is powered on, and then it's another 2 minute before the desktop is loaded and the HD light stops blinking (this is my definition of "usable").
Even though this is the "slow" style MLC SSD, I can't perceive any real lag in writing. It only took 1 hour 40 minutes to dump the image back onto the drive, which is less time then it took the original drive to be read to make that image.
I still need to make a few tweaks to XP to make it a little less write-happy, which will eventually wear out an SSD. There is a great writeup on the OCZ Forum which covers this process. I've not yet done a battery life test but I suspect it will add another hour to the 2.5 hours I currently get (on a 5 year old battery). Honestly, after such a dramatic performance improvement, I don't think I will ever buy another mechanical drive again unless I need something with a high capacity or it's an application where a lot of writing takes place. |
| 6 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| wasssup1990 |
Posted - Oct 25 2009 : 5:25:58 PM
Even though I have a beast of a computer, the fact that computers take forever to load still hasn't changed a lot for as long as I have been using them (about 15 years I think). You know, when you're sitting at the computer saying "OMG this thing is taking forever to load!". You can blame the mecahnical HDD. |
| Aaron Cake |
Posted - Oct 25 2009 : 11:02:58 AM
Mechanical storage is well refined and has some impressive data densities that keep going up. It's fast enough, and cheap. When you combine those things it still looks good to almost everyone. Though I now believe it's not fast enough at all. Most users would not see the concept very well of paying more money for less storage. They don't understand that a HD can be "fast" or "slow", so there is a chicken and egg problem. Manufacturers won't make them standard equipment until they are cheap, but they won't be cheap until they are standard equipment.
My 64GB drive cost about $300, which is a crazy amount of money when I can buy a 1TB mechanical drive for $50. Faced with that bottom line on a system, most people would opt for the cheap one since they don't even know the difference between RAM and hard drives.
The drive I have cost $800 last year, so with luck it will be down near $100 by this time next year and that will spike a large demand for these drives. Laptops will be the first due to the fact they already have a price premium, generally ship with slow drives and have a limited amount of battery capacity.
I did a bit more timing yesterday. From cold boot until I get a Windows login prompt is 20 seconds. From there, it's another 45 seconds until I have a usable desktop. Not bad, just over a minute from cold start. |
| wasssup1990 |
Posted - Oct 25 2009 : 09:50:00 AM
I've been bringing this fact to the attention of anyone I talk to about computers.
I'm guessing in maybe no longer than 10 to 15 years the majority of data storage will be on non-mechanical mediums.
Such a flood of ideas come to mind with all the potential of an SSD. |
| jnewman |
Posted - Oct 25 2009 : 09:10:15 AM
When you step back and think for a second, it does seem funny how in this day and age we depend on a mechanical device to store our data in the middle of a complex electronic system. |
| wasssup1990 |
Posted - Oct 25 2009 : 09:06:30 AM
I've been waiting for SSDs for a long time, more specifically "chip hard drives", since I was a little kid. Only thing is, they're too expensive for me right now for the capacity they are available in. PC Case Gear are selling 250GB for $1000. |
| jnewman |
Posted - Oct 25 2009 : 07:16:50 AM
I did the same kind of thing to my Toshiba Libretto (233mhz, 32mb RAM) after the other 32MB RAM died. I bought a high speed 133x Compact Flash card, bought a CF to Laptop IDE converter, installed it, and wow, the performance just blew the hard disk away. Also made up for the lack of RAM quite well. Also increased the amount of time off the mains, which was good |
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