Just my ramblings.

I almost forgot about this blog until I loaded up Google analytics to checkout my company‘s marketing progress. I’m amazed that I get about 100 unique visitors a day to an empty one page blog. I think I’ll start actually writing here regularly so feel free to check back. Anyway on to the fun stuff.

As more people are becoming aware of the benefit of solid state drive’s and clamoring to get their geeky hands on them manufactures have taken notice and prices have begun to fall slightly.

Personally I’ve had a single 80GB Intel X-25m SSD as my primary OS/App drive for about 8 months now and I’ll never go back to traditional drives. Just yesterday I picked up another to see how far I could push the performance with a striped volume (raid 0).

It’s important to know that raid 0 offers no redundancy so one disk failure and thats about all she wrote for your data. I have a continuous backup solution going to a network server as well as full drive imaging every 4 hours. ( I hate redoing work ).

The test rig.

Dell XPS 435t/9000

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

Intel Core i7 920

4GB Tri-Channel 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM

Onboard Raid Controller

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First up Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200 RPM Sata Drive

Not bad for your average run of the mil sata drive.

Next up the single 80GB SSD, now somehow between reimaging the drives I lost the original screen shot for this but I found one thats very close to the results I got.

A nice boost, the numbers do not do the drive justice in real world testing. Applications explode onto the screen!

Lets Raid it up and see what we can do.

Now we’re talking!

I have write-back cache enabled which really increases performance but with one downfall. Should the machine suddenly lose power data loss is possible (it’s always possible but more so with write-back enabled) so invest in a decent battery backup.

Here’s a real world example (the video is horrible, shot it with my cell phone but you get the idea)

Thats 50 Firefox windows in about 4 seconds, and another 4 seconds for firefox to actually connect and display Google on all 50 windows.

Photoshop, After Effects, Outlook, etc etc all load in well under 5 seconds. With roughly $400 tied into just the drives it may not be practical for the average computer user  just yet but in my opinion well worth the money.

For the techie’s that come and read this yes I know nothing here is even close to conclusive. The idea behind this write up was just to highlight the night/day performance difference between traditional magnetic drives and SSD drives.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

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