   Actual SSD experiences?
  I'm now more than four months into ownership of an Intel X25-M 80GB SSD.  I thought I'd share my experiences and ask how other SSD owners are getting along.My first impression of the drive was that it was insanely fast.  I installed Vista Home Premium in less than ten minutes.  Visual Studio 2005 installed in a minute or two, max.Even after I got everything installed, there was no noticeable delay between logging on and getting useful work done on the computer.  That's with Hamachi, two virtual CD/DVD drive applications, Skype, Ultramon, Dexpot, Synergy, Logitech webcam software, and a half-dozen other things running on startup. Type in my password, the desktop appears, I click on Visual Studio, and it opens instantly.Heavyweight applications opened fast.  Think 2 seconds for Photoshop, 1 second for Visual Studio.Fast forward four months...Like every computer ever, time has taken its toll.  The whole system runs noticeably slower than it did on a fresh install.  The boot process takes longer than it did (though the login/app startup process is incredibly still instantaneous!)In absolute terms, this computer still responds way faster than any other computer I've ever used, even on a fresh install.  It's gotten so that my computer at my office feels broken when I click on the Firefox icon and nothing happens for six seconds.  I actually end up opening programs multiple times because I think I must have mis-clicked.So even after a reasonable break-in period, my verdict on the X25-M is epic win.  I will have one of these (or its successors) in every computer I own from now on.  I may even buy one to use at work, and take it from one job to the next.Anyone else have good or bad experiences with SSDs, now that we've had a little time to get used to them?   
  I'd completely forgotten SSDs even existed.  Maybe VS2010 would be worth using with one...   ;  you should do the firmware update, then it's back to as fast as at the start. i have ssd's since half a year and never look back to hdd's. i got my first x18-m about a week ago and even while being used to ssds (mtron, samsung), this is again another speed gain flash :)i can not stand ordinary hdd's anymore. best ton of money ever spent in the computer business by me.   ;Quote:Heavyweight applications opened fast. Think 2 seconds for Photoshop, 1 second for Visual Studio.You can get that with a hard disk, too. My current laptop after 3-4 months or so still loads Visual C# 2008 Express in 0.88 seconds according to a stopwatch, and it has one of these. Actually, it's probably less than that, since I started the stopwatch BEFORE I started clicking on the icon. [grin]It's about the same for Chrome and most other non-multimedia apps, too.   ;  I bought one on impuls last week, even though I really didn't afford it. (No rent during summer though, thankfully, so I'll get by.) I have to say, this thing is crazy fast. Booting takes 15 seconds from power on to idle at logon screen, and at least five of those are spent POSTing, login is instantaneous, as is program loading. OpenOffice.org, for example, loads in about two seconds from a completely cold cache. That behemoth used to take at least 30 seconds to load.I was a little disappointed that the SSD didn't really provide any tangible reduction in the machine's overall power consumption when idle (8.3 watts both with the X25-M and the old HD,) as that's easier to measure than "normal" use, but I haven't had a chance to test it in the real world, so there may yet be improvements to be discovered.I'm a bit curious about how you manage with Windows on the thing; what do you do about swap, for example? I always have at least a safe 200 megabytes of free memory on my Linux box, so I simply got rid of the swap altogether, and good riddance to it. However, Windows is (in my experience) extremely swaphappy, which I figure would eat an SSD, even the X25-M, pretty quickly. Did you disable it or apply any tweaks to lessen the write load?   ;Quote:Original post by Oberon_CommandQuote:Heavyweight applications opened fast. Think 2 seconds for Photoshop, 1 second for Visual Studio.You can get that with a hard disk, too. My current laptop after 3-4 months or so still loads Visual C# 2008 Express in 0.88 seconds according to a stopwatch, and it has one of these. Actually, it's probably less than that, since I started the stopwatch BEFORE I started clicking on the icon. [grin]It's about the same for Chrome and most other non-multimedia apps, too.With or without Vista's extremely aggressive prefetching? I'm thinking commonly used apps shouldn't be seeing any real improvements in loading times from getting a faster drive under Vista unless the system is under load.   ;  Don't mind me asking, but how much did it cost?Just reading about SSDs makes me want to get one in my next machine (which I was thinking about purchasing in a month or so).  Cost still seems a bit prohibitive to me though...   ;Quote:Original post by ValdermanBooting takes 15 seconds from power on to idle at logon screen, and at least five of those are spent POSTing, login is instantaneous, as is program loading. Booting what? Every review I've read say booting XP/Vista is 30 to 45 seconds. I've got to wonder how you're cutting that in half.I'm strongly considering getting one. I am undecided on whether it's worth the premium over the velociraptor though.   ;  I spent $399, it can be had for $314 now.Valderman: I kept the mechanical drive that came with the machine as a data disk (500GB 7200 RPM cheap drive).  I moved my swap file, Windows Search index files, obviously my whole user profile directory, and a few other things to that drive.  The swap file is basically unused, as I have 6GB of RAM and almost never get close to that level of usage.   ;Quote:Original post by tstrimpQuote:Original post by ValdermanBooting takes 15 seconds from power on to idle at logon screen, and at least five of those are spent POSTing, login is instantaneous, as is program loading. Booting what? Every review I've read say booting XP/Vista is 30 to 45 seconds. I've got to wonder how you're cutting that in half.I'm strongly considering getting one. I am undecided on whether it's worth the premium over the velociraptor though.Booting Arch Linux, from power on to display manager login. Sorry, forgot to mention that part.Quote:Original post by BeanDogI spent $399, it can be had for $314 now.Valderman: I kept the mechanical drive that came with the machine as a data disk (500GB 7200 RPM cheap drive).  I moved my swap file, Windows Search index files, obviously my whole user profile directory, and a few other things to that drive.  The swap file is basically unused, as I have 6GB of RAM and almost never get close to that level of usage.I see. I guess that should keep it safe for quite some time.   