You've optimized your computer for maximum performance, with a speedy multicore processor, fast RAM, and a graphics card with more processing power than NORAD had during the Cold War. Now it's time to add the pièce de résistance: a high-speed solid-state drive (SSD), so you can say goodbye to slow Windows boot-ups, lengthy application load times, and the retro feel of a motor-driven platter drive in a 21st-century computer.
Test Setup
To gauge SSD performance, we set up a test rig with the Asus Rampage III Extreme motherboard, which sports the SATA 3-Gbps Intel ICH10 drive controller that's included with the X58 chipset, as well as a Marvell 9128 SATA 6-Gbps controller. This allowed us to see whether 6-Gbps SATA offers a real boost on SSDs.
To test the performance of these drives, we ran a number of popular disk speed tests, including the venerable HD Tach, the ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Mark 3, and the hard disk test suite in PC Mark Vantage. This isn't a formal review of these devices, but we wanted an objective comparison of how various categories of SSDs performed.
Along with synthetic benchmarks, we also ran some real-world tests, gauging how long it took each drive to boot into the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate (starting our timing at the end of the BIOS drive detection sequence, and ending when the desktop appeared); to start Photoshop CS5 and load a 1.7GB PSD file, and to save that PSD back to disk; and finally, how long it took to copy 5GB of files of assorted sizes to the drive.
Result
Running applications is where SSDs really shine performance-wise. We timed clicking an enormous 1.7GB Photoshop PSD file, gauging how long it took each drive to start Photoshop CS5 and then fully load the file. The telling difference was how much longer we were staring at the Photoshop logo when loading from the Samsung 7,200-rpm traditional hard disk, compared to how quickly it went away when loading from SSD. Because Photoshop loads numerous support files during startup, the time the traditional drive spent moving its heads from track to track seeking those files made for much slower loading than we saw from the SSDs, which can instantly jump from file-to-file. Even Intel's inexpensive X-24V SSD cut over 10 seconds off the 48-second loading time we saw from the hard disk; Crucial's RealSSD C300 loaded the file in less than a third of the time that it took the hard disk.
Interestingly, though all of the SSDs cut more than half the time off how long it took Windows 7 to load, there was little difference in boot times between the fastest and slowest SSDs. To speed your Windows startup and the loading of most applications, any SSD is going to provide a significant improvement.
It is time to think about SSDs drives, changing the SSDs in this time was probably right for you, SSDs have a limited number of write cycles before their memory cells Become unusable. Most ExtremeTech Readers are likely to upgrade their hardware failure long before the typical time of even the shortest-lived SSDs, But it still makes sense to move the swap file off the SSD to reduce wear, considering that the swap file being written to is almost constantly.
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