05 October 2009

Tried an SSD disc in my laptop

I have now tried the Intel X25-M G2 80GB SSD disc in my Laptop.


I previously had a Samsung 5400 rpm disc. The difference is notable! On a subjective level the computer feels more responsive. Opening and closing programs goes much faster! On a objective level I compared with my previous disc.

Start Windows 7 (from power on button), login to active directory domain, launch mysql, and skype
X25-M G2: 45 s
Samsung 5400 rpm: 95 s
Worth mentioning is that the BIOS startup process takes 12 s.

Clean and compile a big Java project in Eclipse (first time)
X25-M G2: 50 s
Samsung 5400 rpm: 116 s

Clean and compile a big Java project in Eclipse (second time)
X25-M G2: 22 s
Samsung 5400 rpm: 40 s
Clearly the OS disc cache in RAM has a big impact the second time.

It is clear that disc intensive operations takes half the time. Sometimes even faster. The booting of Windows is such a example (if the BIOS startup process is subtracted). The reason for this (I'm guessing) is that performance degrades on a spinning drive when several processes accesses the disc in parallel.

I hope that Windows 7 can use the TRIM command so that performance of my SSD disk doesn't degrades over time as the disc fills.

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