I recently had the pleasure of upgrading a laptop from Windows XP to Windows 7, but more importantly, an upgrade from an older SSD drive to one of the latest Trim enabled drives…all I can say is, wow! After a fresh Windows 7 install and full migration of data and apps, I’m seeing under 30 second boot up times…and Outlook loads instantaneously!
Windows 7 has proven to be a pretty darn stable OS and, in my experience, has even resisted traditional Windows speed deterioration bloat surprisingly well. This coupled with the newest Trim support from the newest SSD drives propels my belief that we have arrived at a new paradigm of sustained laptop/workstation speed and efficiency.
Some technical details that you may be interested in:
• Trim is the Way – The newest SSD drives offer Trim support which resolves a serious issue with older drives that caused a significant decrease in read/write speeds over time and as the drive fills (up to 70% speed decrease.) Trim functions as a defrag of an SSD drive since a traditionally defrag is not possible with SSD technology. Some older SSD drives can support a firmware upgrade that will allow Trim functionality.
• Windows 7 Please – Windows XP and Vista do not support automatic Trim functionality at this time, although some manufacturers offer a manual program that performs Trim. Mac Snow Leopard does not currently support Trim.
• Still Pricey, But Not Crazy – 80GB, SSD drives are close to $200 and dropping quickly…256GB runs around $700. Per Gig, these drives are still expensive compared to traditional rotating hard disk drives. If space is needed, pair an SSD as the boot drive with larger capacity traditional hard drives.
• Speed Racer – Experience 4x to 10x faster boot up and subsequent application load time decreases. Benchmarks sites document boot up and application open times range from 2x to 100x faster than on traditional hard drives. This stems from the hard drive being the speed bottleneck of most (if not all) PC and laptops.
• And That’s Not All – Lower power consumption/more battery life, impact/damage resistance, silent operation, and much less heat.
With the new Trim enabled drives and pricing approaching near sanity, the newest SSD offerings have become a choice that I feel should now be a serious consideration, especially in environments where speed and efficiency gains are directly equal to or lead to exponential productivity increases…this relatively modest investment is pretty much a no brainer.
