Sunday, May 8, 2011

Solid State Drive: The Most Valuable Upgrade I've Ever Done

A few months ago, I replaced the 500 GB 5400 rpm drive on my laptop with a 64 GB Solid State Drive .
In order to make this hard drive change, I had to make a fundamental shift with how I stored my files so that very little was stored locally.  I mention how I use an Ubuntu desktop with 4 TB of storage to do this in a previous post.  I dual boot with Ubuntu 11.04 and Windows 7 on my new 64 GB SSD and only run into storage issues with the bloated Windows 7.

Boot and program load times
I can boot into a fully logged in and usable desktop with both Ubuntu and Windows 7 in 20-25 seconds. I used to have to wait 60-90 seconds to get to a usable desktop with Windows and 45-60 seconds with Ubuntu using the standard 5400 rpm laptop hard drive.  Load times on programs have also been significantly reduced.  I wait at least 1/3 of the time I used to for programs to load.

In short, a solid state drive is one of the best and most valuable computer upgrades I have ever done.  I would highly recommend you do the same.
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6 comments:

  1. TG-2BMay 9, 2011 at 6:49 AM

    Yeah, I have been thinking about it, and still can't decide on whether to buy a solid state hard drive or macbook air, which is also a nice laptop with a solid drive.

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  2. MoisesMay 9, 2011 at 5:48 PM

    I'm considering it too. But, I'm waiting for the prices to drop, since I still find SSD too expensive.

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  3. AnonymousMay 16, 2011 at 1:50 PM

    At the start of this school year I built a new a computer and used a 32gb solid state for a boot drive, it was well worth the money (I think it was $60-$70 at the time). It takes longer for my bios/cmos to process than for Windows 7 to load, I timed it at 16 seconds which is somewhat amazing all things considering.

    For notebooks though I heard there is some power saving benefits to going solid state over mechanical hard drives, have you noticed your battery is lasting longer or is it plugged in most of the time?

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  4. AnonymousMay 17, 2011 at 6:48 AM

    I'm also running my Ubuntu desktop machine with a 60GB Corsair SSD as the boot drive, and enjoying the performance benefits.

    I'd be interested in seeing how you setup your SSD; for instance, I moved my /tmp file system to a ram drive to keep from writing excessively to the SSD. Did you make any modifications such as this?

    More importantly, have you run into issues with the SMART reporting tools giving continuing failure notices with your SSD? This appears to be a bug in the reporting system (as mentioned by others regarding Ubuntu SMART and SSD's), but I cannot seem to find any way to turn off the reporting for just the SSD.

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  5. Christopher SoranMay 17, 2011 at 9:28 PM

    @Narcissistastic - My battery life almost doubled after I got my SSD. I went from barely breaking 1 hour to 2 full hours.

    @Doug - I have the 64 GB SSD as the only drive on my laptop. I don't have any other drives and don't worry about excessive writing to the SSD. I don't store any files locally, so if the drive dies, I'll just buy another one and be back up and running in a couple hours. I haven't used any SMART reporting tools, so I haven't run into any bugs myself. What version of Ubuntu are you running?

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  6. TylerMay 18, 2011 at 4:41 PM

    I've been thinking about getting a SSD for my laptop... it's expensive though, and I store a lot of files, right now with my 500GB (non SSD) I rarely have more than 150GB free. Someday maybe I'll figure out a way to get it to all work out, the performance boosts would be much appreciated!

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