SSD Rocks!

So to be honest, I am far from a tech savvy computer hardware wiz, but I know one thing: SSD hard disks rock! To be more clear…

As a small ‘new years gift’ :) the IT department at work gave me a brand new SSD hard disk, as a test drive before upgrading all systems. Only a few months ago I already had performance improvement when I received a 4 GB RAM update, breing the total to 8GB. This was particularly useful when running VirtualBox images, as I saw the swap file increasing then. And as we know, swaps are costly.

But frankly, in day to day use, besides the VM’s, I find the SSD update much more rewarding. Maybe it’s a combination of both – I couldn’t say since I don’t have objective benchmarks – but that SSD really helped a lot. It even shows in the small things, such as opening Microsoft Word ***shiver***. I don’t do it often, as I don’t need it to work, but some info just comes as .doc sometimes, as it does as xls.

Before I always sighed ‘pffff another 10-20 seconds wasted’ What are 10 seconds you say? Well actually, a lot! For just a text document of 100 lines? Hell, I open a 10 000 lines text file in Vim in less than 5 seconds. So having those docs and xls’s opening in <5 secs is a blessing.

Than we have other more obvious performance boosts:

Moreover, I have the feeling I am even missing out on the details, those kind of details you only notice if you would go back to the old ‘slow’ hdd.

As far as space is concerned, it is still rather limited when you don’t want to spend € 300+, but for me 180GB is sufficient. And if I would run out of space, I can still place my personal music on an external HDD, it does not need to be fast, and in essence, it’s not needed for work.

To wrap it up, no benchmarks, but just a gut feeling: SSD rocks!

I’m a happy camper :)