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.
Hi there!This is more along the lines of part time money, but I do have a friend that is miankg their first check with this site: so you might check that out. It’s a site just like mySpace and everyone seems to be having a lot of fun on there + they make money.Hope that helps!
Hi Jesse
Wow – those figures are impressive
I have the Intel 160Gb as main disk – my WEI is now 7.0 (let down by graphics card) But
VS 2010 start up times are still 8-9 seconds and project load time in the area of 8 seconds or more
Do you have any extras installed (e.g. Resharper ?)
Can you give more details of anything you have done ?
Thanks
Mike
I picked up the Crucial C300 which is now $599 for 256GB and generally regarded as the fastest of the bunch http://damieng.com/blog/2010/04/09/macbook-pro-upgrade-to-crucial-256gb-ssd
[)amien
I just upgraded to a Crucial RealSSD c300 and my WEI disk score is a 7.7! Everything is snappy, and my wallet is now a lot lighter. 😉
Congrats on the step up and i have tested a few on my site if interested. Enjoy and drop by if you are ever looking for a bit of SSD background or optimization information… There are a few key tricks to keeping your ssd in top shape!
“Most people don
I hope you bought one with TRIM.
I’ve claimed for a few years now that my iMac is the best PC I’ve owned. It sits in XP all the time, only getting a boot to OS X when I’m bored and want to watch updates.
It might get Windows 7 some day if I can convince my wife (the primary user) that it’s worth the change.