Home Forums Discussions General Discussion SSD Hard drives - big performance boost

thought others might benefit from this....

I just bought a $385 128GB Solid state disk hard drive from newegg.com last week. I've been waiting for prices to drop to this level so I could test improvements. SSD drives are supposed to increase performance several fold, last 280+ years without a failure, use less power and generate less heat.

WOW is all I can say after I did a quick transfer of existing laptop image to the new SSD disk using the 15 day trial of Acronis Disk Tools. The new drive makes Vista seem snappy - didn't think this would ever happen. I plan to put this disk in my server next to increase the entire office performance.

Here is what I bought:

Patriot Torq SSD 128GB disk

Here is the tool I used to transfer the disk image:
Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0

Yes, I am impressed with my 128G drive; mine was $250 or so. My IT guy put it in with my new machine so don't know off the top where he bought it.

Note that you should not try to run defrag on SSD drives because they use a special "wear leveling algorithm" to maximize the life of the drive. I believe win7 is able to detect SSD and disable defrag; not sure that Vista can.

as I was shopping for the next hard drive today, I found out they now have an updated version of drive I bought just last week. The new one has 128MB cache instead of 64MB cache....meaning increased read performance. It is slightly more but if you are shopping be sure to get the latest:

Patriot Torqx 128GB with 128MB cache

If you want to read reviews/price history on drives, check out this link:

Disk compare website for patriot 64 mb cache

Looks like the cache adds significantly to the cost of the drive. Interesting.