SSD (Solid State Drives) Seemed Too Good To Pass Up

Some Background

I recently notice on Amazon a discussion thread of about 15 people saying how absolutely wonderful SSDs are and how the brought new life to their notebook computers.  Every one of them raved about the magic this brought into their lives.

Well, after checking out the prices and performance, it seems that right now there are two classes of these drives.  It seems there is a first generation drive that performs in the area of 15/40Mbs/sec and ones that perform in the 100/170Mbs/sec.  To put this in perspective, when people refer to SATA/150 or SATA/300, the 150 and 300 are the Mbs/sec.  With Vista resource manager, you can actually see for yourself how man Mbs/sec you are actually getting.  Below is a screen shot showing that.

The price point for a 64Gig SSD which performs in the faster category is now about $150.  Off to the computer store I went to get mine.  The one I bought is a Patriot Warp as shown below.

What Happened

So, I get home and immediately put this new drive in my computer and since I now only have 64Gig for my system ( C ) drive, I need to load Vista Business on my Lenovo W500 from scratch (see description at bottom of page).

Immediately, I noticed it booted faster and shutdown faster.  This in fact was power of suggestion because when I looked at the numbers, it really did not boot much faster.  Here is the comparison.

Well, then things really began to fall apart.  It normally takes me a while to load all my different software programs.  Usually I can work at the same time as I’m installing software (most of my software I have ISO’s for so I don’t need to mess with DVDs).  It usually slows me down, but not too bad.  I quickly found that on this SSD, while software was installing, all I could do was wait.  If I tried to do anything else, the computer just slowed to a crawl.

In disbelief, I kept going down this path thinking it was all my imagination and that things were fine and fast.  I even convinced myself this was normal.  Finally, when installing one of my packages from Microsoft I got a failure.  I decided, since I really needed this software I should see if it’s the SSD drive causing the problem.

Next thing I did was to make an image backup with my favorite software (Acronis, see link below), then restore the SSD data to my WD 7200RPM basic rotating drive.  Well, to my total surprise, everything is now fast again and the Microsoft software actually installed no problem.

Conclusion

Wait for the next generation of SSD’s to come out.  This generation just does not work for me.  Thank goodness for 15 day return policies!

Hardware and Software Used