My Upgrade to SSD

by Dave

After much debate and price watching, I've finally bit the bullet and picked up a solid state hard drive.

The drive I settled on after checking the benchmarks, then reading the reviews while comparing features was the OCZ Vertex 2 60GB.

The amount of storage is pretty small, this doesn't concern me much, as the drive will only store the operating system, in this case Windows 7, as well as a few key applications and my current favorite game. I have an additional setup of 2 more 250GB hard drives set up in a raid stripe which are now used for my main drive. As my backup drive, I have information on 3 different places, my raid hard drive, the backup hard drive, and then online. This gives my current configuration a total of 4 hard drives.

Currently my home setup is the above drive setup, a DVD burner, 5GB of RAM, a Gigabyte motherboard. The processor is a black edition x4 940 overclocked at 3500MHz on air, 100% stable. My video card is an ATI HD 4870. Yes, I know, for those of you that follow the site, you'll say, I thought you were and Nvidia guy. I am, but first and foremost, it looks like the deal wins. I got this card for a price I couldn't say no to, so I parted with my BFG video card which was very welcome in my wife's, existence coordinator's computer.

Since my old operating system was on my raid setup, I needed to do a couple of things to get this install to work. First, the backup was completed to make it completely up to date, then as a precaution, I always like to disconnect the backup drive when dealing with installing an operating system and partitioning. Just in case.

With my old drives all disconnected and the backup cable marked, the SSD install is nothing hard. I used the supplied adapter and it fit right into the existing drive bay. The Windows 7 install took longer than usual to identify the drive, but once the installer was going, it didn't take long. Tip for you guys here, make sure you have AHCI enabled in the BIOS to get the most speed out of your SSD.

Hickup on the install. Most all the time, when you install something new, and do a massive configuration change, you run into some kind of a hitch that keeps you from going forward, in this case, it was a slow boot. The Windows screen popped up, but then stayed there without going any further for about 2 minutes. After much research playing and reading, the solution was fairly simple. I disabled all my features in BIOS like sound, LAN, USB, and rebooted the PC. Boot time was super fast. Perfect. Now to turn on the features I wanted one at a time until the slow boot was found. In my case it ended up being the USB legacy support feature which was great since it's not something I need anyway, all other features I use worked perfectly, BIOS set.


Next I powered down the computer, connected the 2 raid drives and booted back up. Since this time I didn't want to make a raid in the BIOS since the drive feature was set to AHCI, I just made the raid setup in Windows under the manage menu.

Finally, all set up, now it was time to connect the backup drive, restore all my programs and settings.

So how fast was the SSD? I'll put it to you this way. All browser settings, different browser, desktop settings, games, preferences, complete backup volume copied to the working drive, and everything restored to the same desktop it was before user end wise took an hour and a half. Typically in the past, this is something I'd span over a couple of evenings then several days later it was all back to the way it was. With the SSD, there were times I have 4 installers going while copying 200GB of data and modifying settings simply because it was tough to bog it down.

For those number people out there, I also had to do a benchmark before and after to see how my drives scored. My current 2x250GB blue edition Western Digital drives scored a benchmark score of 412, which was 55MB/s read and 55MB/s write, random writes were in the 20MB/s. The OCZ Vertex 2 drive had 205MB/s reads, 96MB/s writes, and random writes were at 207MB/s with a score of 1812.

Now that it's all done, I can honestly say, this is an upgrade any computer enthusiast will love. It takes the bottleneck feeling completely out of the hard drive. Applications launch so fast, I'm still getting used to it. Loading times on games at present are held back by my internet connection. I like that. To date, this is probably one of the best hardware upgrades I've done ever. Never have I had a computer upgrade change my system that dramatically.