

Anandtech: Battle of the $125 SSDs - Xichekolas
http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3773

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drats
Just installed an Intel budget ssd two days ago, fresh updated install of
Ubuntu 9.10 had the boot time cut down by just over 10 seconds compared to the
mechanical drive. Apps start very quickly GIMP, Blender, OO Writer et cetera
are all under 2 seconds. 2-3 meg pngs opening in the GIMP take a fraction of a
second. "sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda1" nets ~1330MB/sec over many runs for cached
reads on the Intel and on the two mechanical drives. Buffered disk reads on
the Intel are in the 156MB/sec range, and 51 and 58MB/sec on the mechanical
drives. 6 seconds or so to transfer half a gig of DV video from the mech to
the ssd. It's also very quiet so you don't have that grinding on boot or
opening a folder with pdf/image previews. Chrome and Firefox don't seem to
have the stalls that they did earlier when transferring to disk. Installation
plate to fit into the 3.5" bay was fiddly even with a removable hdd cage, so
was plugging in the cables as it's such a tiny drive. Very pleased all up, 5/5
on value (remember it's only 40gig though).

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bmalicoat
These 'cheap' SSDs really make me consider going the route of replacing my cd
drive in my laptop with one as my boot drive. From what I understand, having
your documents and media on a traditional magnetic drive doesn't really slow
down the boost gained from having apps and the OS on an SSD. Anyone have
experience doing this (specifically in a MacBook Pro)?

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lutorm
I have that setup on my desktop, and it's a considerable improvement over
booting, starting applications, etc, off of the old Raptor 10k drive.

For a laptop it's more problematic since you can only fit one drive
internally. When I upgrade my MBP (whenever the new ones come out), I'll
probably put a larger SSD in it so there's some space for stuff you need to
have on-drive.

~~~
chaosmachine
You can get two hard drives on a MBP if you're willing to sacrifice your dvd
drive:

<http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/>

~~~
apowell
I've done exactly this in my MBP and been very pleased. 80GB X25-M as the
primary drive, and a larger disk as the secondary drive.

As an aside -- for whatever reason, I couldn't get my optical drive to work in
the enclosure provided with the Optibay. I didn't investigate too much, since
it just doesn't matter to me.

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Xichekolas
I have a $100 gift card burning a hole in my pocket so I'm planning to spring
for an X25-V, but if you are considering the same, it might be worth noting
that IMFT's new 25nm flash is coming in Q4 this year, promising double the
capacity for roughly the same price. If you can wait that long that is.

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johnwatson11218
I just bought a Kingston 64GB SSD for about $149 at Fry's. I put it in my Sony
Vaio as the only drive and did a fresh install of Ubuntu 9. It is really super
fast now. Open Office spreadsheet opens in under 2 seconds. It boots in about
15 seconds. The install of the OS was considerably faster etc. I have only had
1 actual session on the new setup but it seemed to speed everything up the
whole time. Loading web pages in google chrome seemed almost unreal.

~~~
windsurfer
Chrome shouldn't be any faster with a faster hard disk, AFAIK. Maybe some
weird I/O flushes in the program were slowing it down...

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mikeyur
Most likely the fresh install had something to do with that. AFAIK the browser
lives in memory and only touches the hard disk for saving files/history.

~~~
johnwatson11218
yea could be. But chrome is so much faster than firefox especially the initial
program load.

