SSD Upgrade

March 28, 2010 (Last Modified: March 28, 2010)

I had recently been thinking of upgrading to a new laptop from my almost three year old Dell XPS M1210. I had my eye on some of the new convertible tablets with the multi-touch monitors. The HP TM2 was an option at first until I realized that it would have less horsepower than my current machine and I played with on at Microcenter and found I disliked the keyboard. Then I was looking at the Toshiba M780, which was really promising on the power, keyboard layout, form factor…but then it turns out it isn’t a multi-touch monitor… only single touch. The big players in what I’m looking for are Dell and Lenovo with their convertible tablets, but they were just way over my current budget. So instead, I bought an Intel X25-M Gen 2 160 GB Solid State Drive.

This weekend I installed the SSD and thought I’d share my experience. At first I thought I’d just restore a backup of the laptop from my WHS onto the new drive, but it turns out there are hoops to jump through if the drive is smaller than the original (which my original drive was 320 GB), and when you install Windows 7 on a SSD drive it makes changes to the installation (it turns off Disk Defragment tool, turns on Trim features if the drive supports it and more) which it wasn’t clear if those changes would be applied if a restore was completed. So, I opted for a full re-install. Event during the reinstall it was clear that the drive was much snappier. Oh, it was also clear that my laptop will now be MUCH quieter.

Here are side by side benchmarks results from a tool called ATTO. By request from Alexi on twitter I ran a benchmark on my old drive, and then on the new one (the one on the left is the old HDD).

As you can see the write and read speeds between the drives just don’t get close to each other (Note that visually these look about the same until you see the scale on the right goes to 200 while the one of the left only goes to 100).

Also, my Windows Experience Index has a 7.0 for the Hard Drive performance. That’s out of 7.9!

I have noticed a significant speed improvement on many operations and loading applications. On the previous 7200 RPM HDD a cold boot would take 36.7 seconds and with the new SSD that same cold boot is 22.3 seconds.

Overall I’m happy I purchased the drive. It was pretty expensive when compared to regular HDD’s of the same size; however, there just isn’t anything close speed wise. I think this was a great investment in keeping me happy with the performance of the laptop until the multi-touch tablets become more reasonable in price.

Thanks to Ben for all the advice and links to articles about SSD drives.

UPDATE (3/28/2010): It turns out that the Intel chipset in my laptop isn’t new enough to support the newest Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers which really improved the performance of the drive for Ben; however, I’m still happy with my purchase given the results above. Also, when I had my old HDD I kept my VMs on an external drive so that they were on a separate spindle and would perform better. Now however, even with having them on the main drive (the SSD) the performance is just unbelievable suspending and resuming.