Wow! I added an SSD to my computer and made it my startup disk. Shazow! My disk rating in Windows went from 5.4 to 7.4 (that is unreal). Load time for Visual Studio is under 2 seconds. Load time for a project in Visual Studio is under 1 second. Compile and Build time is too fast to measure with Mississippi’s.
The most impressive statistic, for me, was that from the time I started installing Windows, until I had all my programs loaded, and all my utilities loaded, and my new disk was indistinguishable from my old, even though I loaded everything by hand, was under 2 hours.
In short, wow they are fast. Pricey but fast.
I bought an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 60GB from MacSales.com for $160 and was so impressed I went back for a 120GB and installed it as a Windows 7 Boot Camp disk.
Their prices are interesting
Size | Cost | Per Gigabyte |
40 | 110 | 2.75 |
60 | 160 | 2.66 |
120 | 300 | 2.50 |
240 | 600 | 2.50 |
480 | 1600 | 3.33 (?) |
So much for savings in scale. In any case, these are wicked fast drives, and they advertise that the drives prevent speed degradation using “ultra efficient block management and wear leveling” while consuming 1/2 the power of other SSDs. Essentially, they claim that these SSDs are stronger, faster, quieter and cooler – and they certainly seem to be. They’re also absurdly small, so small that you may need an adapter to slot them into your computer.
Very sweet.
The Mac Is A Great PC
Most people don’t think of a Mac as a great Windows computer, but my Mac Pro provides 8 cores, 16 GB of RAM, 2.5 TB of storage (of which 1/2 TB is SSD) and runs silent and reliably with an overall perf. score of 7.4 while managing three monitors under Windows 7. The total cost is comparable or less than I’d have paid for other manufacturers, and hey! it’s also a Mac. I can run as a Mac, as a Mac with Windows in a VM, or as a Windows machine, and I can switch back and forth among them by rebooting. Not bad for a couple thousand dollars.
Now, in fantasy land… the new Mac Pro will give you 12 cores, 5 times faster than mine, with faster video, and well, faster everything. Fully loaded, with 32 GB of RAM and 2 TB of SSDs and upgrading everything to top performance, it is a mere $15,500.
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