First SSD and WOW!

Instant launching of applications, and my system boots in ~24-26 seconds. So far Im VERY impressed with my OCZ nocti 120GB.

 

Welcome to the SSD owner's club. Now, every HDD will feel as slow as molasses in winter. It's both a blessing and a curse since when you get one, it's hard to live without it.

 

When I ordered my x230 I thought I could live without a SSD even though I used one for the last 2.5 years. I was wrong....

 

Yeah, it has some of that "you don't notice it until it's gone" factor.

 

This is how I feel about platter drives...

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Congrats again.

 

LMAO yeah the only mechanical drives I own are in servers and I could care less about them as Im never sitting in front of them.

 

Don't stop. Keep buying more SSDs for other laptops/systems at home

 

I convinced my girlfriend to get one. Paid more for it ($90) than she paid for the laptop ($54).

 

Just as soon as you find me that winning lottery ticket...

Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk 2

 

Definitely underestimated the power of SSD... laptop boots up and is ready to use in under 25 seconds. Never looking back now

 

Yeah messing with bios/post behaviors and Im def under 25 seconds for total boot time.

 

yup... It's impossible to go back.

 

Welcome to 3 years ago for me, changing everything over to SSD.

 

At this point I think I could go back...but that would only be if I had no choice. Sure the gain in performance was night and day, but being as I have been using 100% mechanical drives for the past 20 years I think Ill be OK. Hell if I can go from a quad core m17x and dell xps 1645 to a 3 year old LV x200s I can adjust to anything.

Yeah no way Ill be able to change everything over to SSD as the space I need for data alone would warrant buying a drive thats alot more expensive then my laptop + upgrades. OS drives? Sure, but I also dont see any reason to update/upgrade my other rigs as they are all servers that function well enough as is.

 

You have finally seen the light? Welcome to the SSD heaven.

 

I would be buying my first SSD soon. Sounds like I'm in for a ride!

 

Welcome to the SSD Universe; very nice...

Now, be very sure you have -current- backups of the -entire- SSD, since you're in the OCZ Galaxy portion of the SSD Universe, in which stars are prone to go supernova at any moment with -no- advance warning... I and many, many others on this board know about this directly, and most of us have purchased only -one- OCZ SSD in our lifetimes.

Next time, buy one of the more reliable brands of SSD, of which there are many posts on the board to guide you...

 

24-26 seconds? Thats slow.

I boot in under 10 on my m4

 

I never understood that either. N7720 + Samsung 830 boots with all programs running very very fast, from cold.

I think 25s is for my G55VW with Seagate SSH since I have to wait a little for them to start, is not instant.

Shut down seems about the same with both.

 

Including POST?

On my G73, it takes about 25 secs from the moment i press the power button, POST, windows, password login and launching my browser.

 

on my desktop, my m4 256gb, from power button to firefox being responsive, takes about 12-15s. that inlcudes the time to takes for me to punch in a short password.

do laptops just POST alot slower than desktops?

 

Depends I guess.

I just did a series of cold starts to see if results are consistent.

SSH will start in ~25s until all programs load and Asus made sure there are quite a few plus mine. I'm not sure how that 8 Gb cache works at start up. I'm not sure if it even works at all.

SSD on a different system under 10s for the same procedure, programs are the same more or less. I have tested this a lot since that was my first SSD and I was curious why people say ~30s for a boot.

Network part is a bit different for me so I can not make it count.

Anyway, we should take boot as boot, not until I start to write in here But it could be about the same with Generic User #2 example if I had the same system for network.

Firefox loading time with ~50 tabs is almost instant on SSD and fair on SSH, it is still a HDD in the end.

Shut down takes about 5s on both.

 

Yeah, probably depends on the laptop. I can boot from cold to a useable desktop in 18 seconds flat (automatically log in) with the 330 (use to be ~24 with the 320).

@OP: Welcome to the club!

 

SATA II vs SATA II thing and then it depends on how long POST is. My desktop takes longer to post since it has quite a few extra controllers (which i use) to start during POST so it goes through e-SATA, extra SATA III then rest of POST and finally windows. Windows is ridiculously fast to load, but overall it still takes a lot of time because of post that takes over 20 secs.

After that it will also depend on how clean your windows install is. I got quite a few extra startup items that i actually want there at startup that slow things down on the G73.

 

Yeah, my work laptop has old 5400RPM spinner. I can't believe how much time I waste just waiting for it to boot up in the morning, and doing anything even remotely I/O intensive. My laptop is reasonably new too compared to others, it at least has a Sandy Bridge CPU. Most other people have a core 2 duo still. I have so many SSD's now, many are only 60-64GB but even for my kids' netbooks, it's necessary. For my HTPC I have a 96GB Kingston that I nabbed a while ago for less than $60. Not to mention the 512GB *and* 256GB Crucial M4's in my Sager NP9150. Hello, my name is HTWingNut and I'm an SSD addict.

Although I have to admit that the Samsung's are definitely VERY fast. I have one in my miniscule little NP6110 11.6" gamer, and it screams.

 

I'm really, really looking forward to getting an SSD. That said, I can't justify sticking one in my 3-year-old laptop so I have to wait until I get a new one...

On the subject of this, how much faster is having everything on an SSD as opposed to having Windows and programs on the SSD and a platter drive for larger stuff? I know that both setups are ridiculously fast, but I'm curious as to how negligible the difference is.

 

Of course, you can justify sticking one in your 3y/o laptop! I just put a SATAIII SSD in my SATAII laptop. I didn't decide to wait until I had the right hardware. The drive can move up with me.

Last year, I helped a friend speed up her MBP. Pathetic thing about MBP is that the model SHOULD be SATAII, but Apple made them SATAI instead. Why? Ridiculous, if you ask me. Anyway... super slow machine. A simple RAM upgrade and SSD (III, even though only at I speeds) and the thing is infinitely snappier than it was before. It's been almost 10 months since the hardware upgrade and she hasn't uttered a single complaint about how her MBP is performing.

 

Including post it's about 13-15 seconds for me.

EDIT: With windows 8 it was about 10 seconds including post.

 

hey i stuck a Crucial M4 256 GB into a 3 or 4 year old laptop too (the wife is using it). It brought the laptop to life!! Otherwise my cell phone feels faster than that laptop Probably should buy it now because by the time we buy a new laptop, we'll have to be buying new software and accessories instead of an SSD... and we can transplant the SSD over to the laptop unless it already comes with one.

Regarding the dual drives (SSD for Windows/programs and HDD for data)... yeah that will work too. I did this for some time on my current laptop. There is a wake-up lag if the HDD is in the sleep mode (on mine that wll be every minute the HDD sleeps/powers down). So it gets a little annoying when opening/saving files. It'll be better if we can have everything on one (or more) SSD(s) (no lag on startup from sleep now). Probably best is buy a larger capacity SSD and keep/use the HDD in the same laptop/system for routine backup from the main SSD.

Have fun there!!

 

First SSD I ever experienced was in the wife's netbook purely for shock resistance, but amazingly it breathed new life into an Atom-powered machine I thought was hopelessly bottlenecked by the CPU. It's still bottlenecked by a hard-limited 2gb RAM, but it's at least usable for most daily tasks. Not that she actually uses it, now that she has a tablet...

I then bought an mSATA SSD for my laptop, and used a mechanical drive for data storage. That got old, and the spinner was still a drain on battery life, so I went full SSD with a 256gb model. I then re-built my desktop when Sandy Bridge and Z68 came out, and went with a small SSD for the OS and a large mechanical drive for games and data, which I've accelerated with a 64gb SSD for SRT.

The 256gb in the laptop got full, and prices have come way, way down, so I've swapped that out for a 512gb M4. The 256gb drive now resides in the wife's PC, which is only SATA2 anyways, but it's much much faster than the 1tb 5400RPM drive she was using previously. She used to complain that it took over a minute to start up and shut down, now it takes about 20-30 seconds, including whatever bloat she's allowed to install itself.

I use a mechanical HDD at work and I can't stand it. The rest of the machine is a Pentium 4, 2GB RAM, and an 80gb HDD, to give you an idea of the frugality of this company, and it's an utter pain for even the most basic office tasks. Lots and lots of paging.

 

That's awesome, it speeding up even SATAI. Unfortunately all I've got is a SATAI, it turns out. But on the other hand, my drive right now's a stupidly slow 5400 rpm 256gb hard drive. Between the HDD, RAM, Core 2 Duo, or integrated graphics I don't know what's bottlenecking the computer anymore.

If I was going to hold onto my laptop for a while, I'd get one right now for it but I'm in the market for a new one. If I were to give it to someone I'd stick in an SSD if the prices drop. Fortunately it seems like the bottom's dropped out on them lately.

 

A lot of that speedy feeling from a SSD is from access times, not so much SATA speed. With a mechanical drive, you have to wait for the platter to physically spin to have the head read a certain block (or more likely, many blocks) of data scattered across the whole drive, whereas with an SSD, that data is just there. Doesn't matter if it's on NAND chip #1, #2, #3, ... it can all be accessed at the same time.

The C2D is most likely not holding you back, likewise for the RAM. I'd just grab a decent SATA II SSD and install it to boost speed.

 

Congratulations! Haha was about time you got one

 

I'll have to wait a few years before I can get one, I've just put a 500Gb sata in my CF-19, I looked at the price of a 500Gb SSD and nearly shat myself

 

i would honestly rather carry around an external drive than not have an SSD as my main drive.

the difference is THAT big.

in your case, I would at least get the seagate momentus XT 750GB.*

*not the 500GB SKU, the caching features on that one are older and only half as good.

 

Me too. And that's what I do. Save everything to a external and load on my desktop after.

Sent from my ARCHOS 80G9 using Tapatalk 2

 

Honestly I thought there would be a bigger difference than I have noticed. Coming from a 5400 RPM hard drive I expected it to feel much faster but the only time I really notice a difference is when booting, and I rarely ever shut down anyway. Applications open slightly faster but nothing world shattering and I don't copy large files very often.

 

I've been saying this for forever (okay, about 3 years), but people (in this thread and others) still want to be sensational. Lol...

SSD's do not make a system 'awesome', but they certainly bring it a tiny step closer to where they should be (for 2012).

To be honest: doing a clean install of Win8 vs. Win7 (and ignoring all the Metro crap...) is more of a performance boost than an SSD makes for my uses (but combine an SSD and Win8 and the performance increase is really nice to experience, of course).

 

use the drive alot for two weeks. then switch back to the HDD.

 

2 weeks? How but (on and off) for 3 years? Lol...

 

I have used it a lot for the past week and did just put the 5400 RPM back in because I was thinking of just selling the SSD and the only difference I really notice is still in boot time.

 

have to agree with abaddon, i was expecting the change yossd to be some earth shattering experience but have been left somewhat underwhelmed. i bought a refurb and the normal memory was the primary memory with the os on and the ssd was the secondary memory. i ran it like this for a while then reinstalled the os onto the ssd. other than quicker start up(about half the time), i cant see much difference.

after having done the os reinstall i had a few regular apps/programs on start up and the start was relatively fast. today i installe about a dozen or so apps/programs and although all these are configured in msconfig so as not to start up my start time has increased by an additional 10 seconds or so.

why has the start time increased when i only have the same programs on start up?

 

For those who claim they don't see much of a difference, try doing doing 2+ separate things the require heavy disk i/o on a regular hard drive and watch those tasks get brought to their knees. Better yet, do that and use up all your physical RAM so that you're paging badly at the same time.

On my old machine w/hard drives only, just starting iTunes was horrendous w/tons of disk thrashing. It's pretty quick to start now, w/no noise.

 

Yeah, but since that is unlikely for some users, they will never see the speed in action.

 

But that just goes to show how important RAM is and how important it is to use the fastest 7200 RPM HDD's properly setup/partitioned and cared for with something like PerfectDisk 12.5.

And how important it is to use class leading software (if you can) and not the circa 1985 programming level of junk that iTunes is based on.

 

RAM and fastest 7200 rpm hard drives doesn't make up for the terribly seek times and latency that mechanical hard drives have compared to SSDs (w/no moving parts).

Err, iTunes didn't exist in 1985. I use iTunes because I have some iDevices and do use them to manage and sync my music and podcasts along w/iOS device sand their apps. The star ratings, smart playlists, last played date, playlists, syncing, etc. are all super useful.

 

Tiller, sorry, but that is one of the most "way out there" things I've ever read in one of your posts.

 

iTunes doesn't have to exist in 1985 to be written like it was...

Benchmarks (ie: 'terrible seek times') and 'no moving parts' do not make something unusable nor slow - see post(s) above.

Ha ha... I'll take that as a compliment.

I remember a similarly useless program called real player that would make the system come to it's knees (to simply play music!!!). At least computers are 1000x more powerful now so that junk like iTunes runs (eventually...).

Yeah, if you have idevices, you have no choice (but really, you do...).

 

OIC. When you say "that iTunes is based on", you do not necessarily mean the code itself is based on some past piece of software, but rather that it was written w/ no eye for performance.

A quick editorial... to say S/W in '85 was bad is incorrect as well. I know a lot of ole timers who wrote some really kick-butt unix/dos based stuff database stuff that still puts today's bloatware apps to shame.

 

I had the unfortunate pleasure of using a 5400rpm in my K53TA and it was incredibly painful to use. I could barely manage my audio editing work without delays/lag (5-6 sec delay if I selected a .wav file, 7200rpm is 1sec delay which is bearable) and I probably wasted hours on loading screens when playing games - especially MMO's

Congrats on the SSD! I hope to get one for myself in the near future when I have the disposable income available (student debts FTL).