Has anyone tried switching to an SSD?

Hi everyone,

Kevin's article Should You Upgrade to Windows 7? mentions that Windows 7 improves performance for solid-state drives, and I know that several companies now offer some laptops with SSD only.

What I'm wondering is whether anyone here has tried replacing your existing hard drive with an SSD. What brand SSD did you use? How noticeable was the change in performance? What about improved battery life?

Thanks,
Elliot

Eliott, are you using a PC or a Mac?  There's a piece of software out there called HD Tach that will rate your current drive.  Then you can find results for someone that has a similar maching to yours and replaced it with SSD.  My colleague did this before and after he replaced his drive.  He had a huge performance boost, but he is running an old laptop with a max of 1GB RAM - not even sure that laptop will run Windows 7 (think it might be a PIII, one of the old slim Dell lattitude x300's or something).  He got his replacement SSD for about $120 I think.

I'll ask him to post here to give you the research he found.

I recently read The State of Solid State Hard Drives by Jeff Atwood.

Intel was the only game in town for about a year, but fortunately for us consumers, the competition finally caught up. The new Indilinx controller models, such as this Crucial 128 GB SSD, are just as fast as the X25-M. And, best of all, they're cheaper, while also offering a not-insubstantial bump to 128 GB of storage!

I picked this model up for $325 plus tax and shipping. And, frankly, I was blown away by the performance difference compared to the 300 GB Velociraptor I had in my system before. That drive is not exactly chopped liver; it's incredibly fast by magnetic platter drive standards. But it's beyond slow next to the latest SSDs

Thanks a lot, guys.

Actually, Chris, my interest is primarily academic (though I did consider trying a switch with my old iBook, before its logic board exploded). I'm working on an article for our upcoming GreenTech campaign about making upgrades to your computer to extend its life. Someone mentioned SSD (both as a general upgrade and also as a way to improve energy efficiency), and I didn't know very much about it.

Thanks for the link, David. That article explained a lot that I didn't understand. I thought it might be interesting for others too, so I just blogged about it.

Happy Friday,
Elliot

PS: That was kind of a mess. I just edited David's post instead of posting a new one, but I think everything is fixed now. I'll get my moderator permissions revoked yet!

I brought a Dell Mini 9 with a 4GB miniPCI SSD. It's been working great, no noise or heat. However, one should avoid using hibernation or a swap file as SSDs only support a limited number of write operations, even with something called TRIM. And if you have an Intel SSD or am thinking of getting one and using it with Windows 7, you might want to read this article:

Bad Vista-to-Windows 7 upgrade experiences #1: 'Hosed' Intel SSDs http://www.betanews.com/article/Bad-VistatoWindows-7-upgrade-experiences-1-Hosed-Intel-SSDs/1256744226

 EDIT: One should also avoid defragging, as that would cause extensive write operations.