Transitioning to SSD

So my dear friends chipped in and got me an Intel x25-m gen2 80gb ssd for my 21st, it’s intel’s attempt to provide a mainstream ssd product that contains the same performance as it’s more expensive counterparts.

It arrived around 2-3 weeks ago, however, it took me several days to get it installed. Mainly because, it didn’t come with any brackets so impossible to fit inside my computer, unless I result to using cable ties or even let it hang lose in the drive bay.

I went to 6 different shops, 3 local and 3 in the city. Finally, I was able to purchase a bracket at Capitol Computers. However, it came with 2 brackets and I only need one. If anybody needs a 2.5″ bracket to fit inside a 3.5″ bay, let me know.

However, that worked out all nicely but I have an Antec Sonata II case, but it has rubber vibration dampeners on the 3.5″ brackets. Meaning that the screws are too short to reach. But taking out the dampeners would mean too big of a hole so the screws fall right through. Had to dig up some washers in my house and finally managed to get it installed safe and sound.

Here is the SSD fitting on the palm of my hand.

And here it is sitting comfortably inside it’s two brackets.

I also decided to compile a video of the boot time when using my 7200rpm hdd compared to the ssd.

This is NOT scientific at all. Mainly because the hdd uses a different bootloader (grub), I had to hit enter during the boot process so grub doesn’t lapse through the 10 seconds and it was NOT a clean install. But even considering all those factors, the reduction in boot time is significant.

Sorry for the crappy quality video but I couldn’t be bothered re-rendering the files to be any better.

I’ve had the ssd for couple of weeks now and realised that my pc now boots faster than the Windows 7 boot animation. So I decided to disable it and then run the same test. Here are the results.

It shaves around 1-2 seconds off the boot time. I realise it’s not very significant but just another micro-optimisation

Here are the specifications of my machine:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13ghz
RAM: 4gb
GPU: Nvidia 7600GT

The SSD brought my hdd rating from the bottom to the top, but it seems now my bottleneck is the CPU. Firefox doesn’t seem to load any faster. Chrome loads instantaneous, likewise for IE.