Initial reactions are - it’s amazing…

My brand new Dell Studio XPS i7 is a beast, but I suspect it has a rather cheap and cheerful hard drive.  It’s never been that quick to do things, which is rather surprising given it’s a Core i7 with Vista 64bit (SP2RC) and 6gb RAM!  The drive is a Seagate Barracuda, but with Vista it just isn’t that quick:

Vista 64 cold boot: 3m16s

Of course, that’s with all my apps, Antivirus and MS Mesh installed.

I installed the Samsung 64GB SSD, and Windows 7 (build 7048) 64bit, and the result was:

Win7 64 cold boot: 41s

Wow! Of course that’s a clean install of a new OS, but the difference is significant.

It’s worth adding that the install takes up 18.4GB on the disk, and that the installation took 18m48s in total.

More to come I’m sure tomorrow, when more hardware arrives

Dan

Sure enough, this was both one of the most exciting, and the biggest anti-climaxes, I’ve had recently. I mean, this is an SSD! I can’t wait to get my hands on it! This was a steal from Novatech at £99, and is finally a decent blend of size (for and OS disc) and cost.

However, when it arrived - bah… Brown box and no branding… Sigh… Not very exciting. Guess I’m going to have to leave the excitement for the results! Should be good though, because although this is an MLC drive, it does not use the dreaded JMicron controller that has ‘blessed’ many other SSDs with a serious case of stuttering.

I’m going to stick this thing in every machine I can lay my hands on and see how it works!

Dan