The Need for Speed
Am not talking about the game here, its about the recent PC rig i built, after having built a good performance machine and windows 7 RC was also round the corner, i decided to give it a shot, so i had an old 120GB PATA drive and installed win 7 RC, was good, but still the Windows experience index rated only 5.2, analysing it, it was the harddrive that created the bottleneck.
How can a HDD be a bottleneck in such a good PC and all the money spent in it, so started the search, at first, i thought i would go for a small WD Velociraptor for the OS and apps, but there was a huge upbeat about Solid state Drives, soon after a couple of reviews and benchmarks it was clearly evident that the two decent ones in the market are the OCZ and the Intel m-x25 drives, the Intel drive was clearly way put of my budget.
I had already made up my mind to make another hole in my pocket and plunge the SSD route, so started searching for a good price OCZ Core Series V2 SSD, finally got one on ebay for a good price.
Installed it on my PC with win7 and i can clearly see a world of difference with the loading speeds, boot speed increased considerably, app loads are all blazingly fast.
Previously win7 load on the PATA took 1:05 minutes and now its just 23 seconds to a usable desktop, applications like photoshop, lightroom and games like NFS and flight simulator load in less than half the time than it would have on a spindle SATA drive.
HDTune benchmarks also state pretty good IOps and read speeds, the random access time was the fastest that any spindle drive cannot achieve, its a mere 0.2ms, Write speeds are not that impressive, but am going to use this drive only for the OS and applications, all other data will stay on the 500Gb Seagate SATA drive, also have moved the pagefile and Temp files to the 500Gb drive
In all am happy that money spent is not a waste and quite satisfied with the SSD drive performance.