My Experience With Solid State Hard Drives (SSD)

At one point the computer hardware industry seemed to be focused on processing speed alone, the race to get to 3Ghz, and the $$$ spent to get that extra 100Mhz of speed. All the bottlenecks that existed seemed to be neglected (RAM, BUS speeds, etc) and marketing focused on CPU speed alone. We were still using SDRAM with 133Mhz BUS, speeds, and IDE hard drives on 100Mhz BUS speeds, and 256kb CPU caches.

I am pleased to see that the focus has been changed. We are seeing higher RAM Bus speeds, higher front side Bus speeds, faster Hard Drive controllers (eg SATA), multiple CPU cores, and huge CPU caches. While all these bottlenecks get resolved, what still seems to be the slowest part of any computer is the hard drive, which is where your operating system, programs, and data is stored and loaded from.

I've been reading for a while about Solid state drives, their benefits, and their downsides. I couldn't wait to get my hands on one and see for myself. Finally, an opportunity presented itself for me to experiment while spending time, but not money.

A friend of mine had an HP entertainment laptop (HP DV9330CA) which was having problems. He brought it to me and I diagnosed it with a failing hard drive since formatting the laptop didn't solve the instabilities, and a hard drive diagnostic failed with bad sectors.

This laptop can fit 2 internal drives, and a DVD drive at the same time. SSD prices have dropped to around $200 and the technology has improved. This was it! The perfect candidate to experiment with SSD (one 60GB SSD for the OS and progrms, and one 120GB 5400 rpm drive still intact for documents and data, without sacrificing the DVD bay).

After convincing my friend to go for the update, I purchased the drive and installed Windows 7. What a difference! The computer boots to a fully usable, logged in Windows desktop in around 30 seconds!

The laptop is 3 years old and performed excellent after the upgrade, so I could only imagine how the performance would be on a newer laptop. I'm not going to bore you with benchmarks and specifics, as you can find that in other articles and review online. I am just pointing out that when you experience the performance first hand, it is very noticeable and appreciated.

I will end this post with this tip:

Adding more RAM, is still one of the best "bang for buck" upgrades you can do to a computer these days. However, adding a solid state hard drive in addition or instead of, will also be a very noticeable and rewarding upgrade. Depending on the hardware and $$ willing to spend, I would do both.

The nice thing about an SSD is even if your current computer dies, it can be used in your new computer with even better results, or as a superfast eSATA external drive. One other benefit of SSDs I would like to add is the fact that there are no moving parts, making it even more ideal for laptops and/or external drives.

Introduction

Welcome to my blog. I never knew or cared to find out what the big deal with blogging was all about. Throughout my day to day life I come accross good deals, tips, and other random thoughts that I would like to share.

Finally one day I thougt to myself it would be cool to have my own site and post these things. That's when I realized "Hey, wait a minute! I think that's what you can use a blog for!".

So here it is, my blog. Expect to find my reviews and feedback of people I deal with in regards to purchasing equipment, home improvements, electronics I experience or purchase, etc.