1st SSD installed last night......... BFD????

[smitbret]

I have two older 2.5" laptop drives as imaging/backup drives in my desktop since I didn't know what else to use them for. Once I did an OS image on of those HDd, and there I could clearly see the difference between my OS on SSD and running off a laptop HD. It was PAINFUL. While "booting onto desktop" (until the desktop appeared) was still halfway tolerable...the drives just wouldn't stop spinning and accessing after the boot with loading the AV software and the few startup programs.

I also see this at the wife's LT how disk accesses happen even AFTER the desktop is already visible....in others words the booting DOES take significantly longer until the system entirely loaded all the crap. While it's not "instant" here on a SSD, booting IS faster and it only takes a very short time afterwards 'til disk accesses stop.

This WAS the biggest issue I had with this laptop. Desktop would load and it would still take 1 or 2 minutes before I could really do anything while the HDD spent its time loading auxillary services into memory. I can honestly say that has been reduced to less than 10 seconds. I am impressed by this.

My desktop, by comparison, has never had this issue with platters or I would strongly consider an SSD for it.

 

[smitbret]

You didn't mention what SATA speed the laptop connection is using. Anything less than SATA 3 (6Gb/s) is not going to give you maximum performance. In fact, SATA 3 is too slow for an SSD, but it's the best we've got for now.

I was thinking about this when I ran the drive through Atto Disk Benchmark last night. The Write Speeds were capping out at about 150MB/s but the Read Speeds were capping out around 270-280MB/s. It would have to be SATAII. I wouldn't expect a budget laptop like this to have SATAIII.

Is it normal for an SSD to have Read speeds 2x as fast as Write Speeds, though?

 

[Cerb]

Is it normal for an SSD to have Read speeds 2x as fast as Write Speeds, though?

At low capacities, yes. 120GB->240GB->480GB in the M500 is, internally, like going from a single drive to 2 in RAID 0 to 4 in RAID 0. They're using the same density flash, just less of it, on the smaller ones.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5593/crucial-m500-120gb-ssd-review/index8.html

Perfectly normal. Why don't we care, and try to get people to pay more for an Extreme II 120GB, instead, given those CDM scores?

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5593/crucial-m500-120gb-ssd-review/index9.html

Because in practice, things look a lot more like that, unless you're a disk-heavy power user and/or content creation professional.

 

[silicon]

I ran mine through this last night:

http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

Took 2 reboots and about 15 minutes and took care of it.

I ran the drive through Atto Disk Benchmark before and after. Read speeds seemed to be minimally affected, but Write speeds jumped by about 20% immediately after doing it. I'm still trying to learn how to decipher the graphs, though.

What is the step by step to do this?

 

[smitbret]

What is the step by step to do this?

I just installed it and opened the program

Identified the SSD on the screen

Right-Click <Align> on all of the paritions on the drive

Click <Apply> at the top left and let it run

 

[silicon]

I just installed it and opened the program

Identified the SSD on the screen

Right-Click <Align> on all of the paritions on the drive

Click <Apply> at the top left and let it run

Ok Thanks....Its all done and the partition is aligned...seems faster at boot and to load programs.