Once you've gone SSD you can't go back
To set a little background; we investigated SSDs for certain roles at work. Turns out they're not quite ready for what we wanted to do. So, on with the testing, but this time more personal
OCZ Vertex2 Pro 100GB, "Enterprise" MLC SSD...
This ran in my main rig at home for about 2 Months, I turned my PC off a little more, rather than just using sleep as usual. This was kind of annoying, loosing all my tabs etc, so I stopped.
No benefit for my usage pattern there.
Lightroom; Surely importing 8GB of Raw photos & editing would see an improvement... well actually, not so much. It still stuttered when changing photos. I Realise these are 30mb files, and that they take a few seconds to load from a HDD, but still not seamless on an SSD. Better? yes, worth SSD Money? No.
Games? well, whatever. Perhaps a few seconds faster, maybe not, I didn't use a stopwatch. Extracting stuff, much better, but I don't do a huge amount of that. Installing programs, this is a difficult one. I expected to be able to install multiple apps at once, and generally avoid the 'I'm installing stuff, and therefore virtually unusable' state that my PC normally enters. Well, windows installer limits you to a single concurrent installation, the actual install times weren't an awful lot quicker. Yes, a bit less laggy when doing an installation in the background, but still significantly slower. Decrypting Steam pre-orders was a bit quicker...
Better for these things? Yes. Justifiably? No.
Multitasking... aside from the issue with running an installer & doing everything else, I don't expect my PC to perform miracles for me. Encoding a 25GB movie file, and playing Crysis 2 isn't something I'm interested in doing... I don't often run into HDD bottlenecks with multi-tasking on my main box. I guess this is superfetch doing its thing. I can quite happily leave my browser/chat/apps etc open, and fire up a game, drop a film on the second screen, whatever. I have on occasion left EVE in the background and played something else over the top, accidentally. I didn't even notice until I quit. One benefit is when dropping out of a memory hungry game, pulling the paged out data from the SSD was much quicker, resulting in better exit times. That's useful if some-one calls and I need to quit & do something else quickly, but actually that doesn't happen very often.
So... all in all, it wasn't worth the small space, and I couldn't justify buying my own SSD. I went back to my 500GB F3, More than a little disappointed in SSD performance I have to say!
What I did next, was drop the SSD into my (work) laptop. That was a night & day difference! The first two benefits are obvious, an increase in battery life, already 6-7hr, it is now 8hr+, Some weeks I only charge it once or twice
Shock resistance; the stock toshiba HDD had auto-parking heads to prevent damage, this is good. What's not good is when you move, and the machine pauses for 3-4sec in the middle of doing something.
Hibernation is now very good. It'll hibernate in <1min, resume in <1min, I've reduced the sleep timer to 15mins, which has helped a lot with battery life, because waiting for it to come back is no longer the 4-5min chore it used to be, and there's no extended period of sluggishness after a resume. Cold boots are decent too, but I only do those when updates have been installed.
And finally, performance. This isn't a great as I was expecting after all the hype, but definitely a far more dramatic upgrade than on my desktop. When I run low on free space (3-4gb), it starts lagging a bit, but tidy it up, leave it on overnight for Trim to do its thing, and its fine again. Overall application loading times are far better than the old disk, and multitasking is much better. Its clear that the bottleneck in this machine was very definitely the disk. Perhaps this wasn't the case in my desktop.
My old system never used to do that.
