Sunday, April 05, 2009

I've been hearing a lot about SSD (Solid State Disks) lately.  When Joel Spolsky posted his results. I decided to try it myself.  I started by looking around at what to buy.  I found that prices varied a lot.  The drive Joel used in his test was among the most expensive.  I looked into why that was.  I found 2 well written articles here and here.  Based on this information I felt it was best to pay the extra money and go with the Intel X25-M 160GB Model.  I thought about getting 2 and spanning them, but that was just too much money.  I ended up getting the drive from Newegg.

To back up just a bit, I had other reasons for getting the drive.  I've been fighting some odd blue screens lately.  It has not been real bad, but about every week or so my computer would BSOD.  It seemed to be a memory issue, but I couldn't reliably narrow it down.  It had been a year since my last re-build and it was time.  I was hopeful that a complete re-build would also get rid of my BSOD issues.  This was the perfect time to install a new boot/app drive. 

The drive that I purchased was a 2.5“ version which presented the first issue.  I installed this into my beefy desktop rig.  I ended up getting a mounting kit. This is the only kit I could find.  It ended up not being ideal.  It does expand the width to fit the 3.5“ bay width wise.  It does not expand the length.  I didn't worry too much about this, I just attached the front 2 screws in my case and let it sit on the bottom bay.  There aren't any moving parts to an SSD so I'm not that concerned.  Probably not the cleanest install though.

I simply disconnected my primary disks (4 in a Raid 0+1) and ran with just the SSD drive.  It detected it fine and I installed Windows Vista 64.  I wasn't paying much attention to the Vista install but it did seem fast.  It took about 30min to get to booting for the first time.  I then spent another 3 hours or so getting all the latest updates and all the software I need re-installed.  Once that was all done, I connected my RAID back up and made sure the BIOS was set to boot from the SSD.  Everything worked great.  Actually, one of the smoothest re-builds I've done.

Before I re-built I did do some simple, non-official timings of tasks that I do on a normal basis.  Let me start with the details of my rig:

• Mother Board: ASUS Striker II Formula
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4ghz
• 8GB Crucial RAM
• GeForce 6800 (drives 2  - 20“ monitors)
• GeForce 8600 (drives 1 - 30“ widescreen)
• 4x250GB 7200RPM drives (RAID 0+1)

Here are the results of my timings before the re-build:

• Boot - power off to Vista side bar displays: 4:06
• Launch Word : 26s
• Launch Outlook: 31s
• Launch Visual Studio with a large solution: 1:27
• Re-build large solution: 2:35
• Launch PhotoShop: 22s
• Launch IE8 loading google: 5s
• Launch Safari loading google: 8s
• Launch Zune Player: 17s

I was most disappointed with the launch time for Visual Studio and the re-build since that's what I do most.  Here are the times with the SSD drive.  Keep in mind, this is with all of my code files on the SSD:

As you can see, that's a huge difference in speed.  This of course comes with the caveat that my previous build had been running for a year and had accumulated crud as always.  I'm sure if I simply just re-built using my existing drives that it would have been faster.  I don't believe it would have been as fast as it is. 

It will be interesting to see how it goes over the next few months, but I now believe adding the SSD drive was the single best thing I could have done to my rig to make it faster.