I just installed new copy of windows 7.

Boot time:

18 seconds to get to boot selection screen (I have this artifically set in bios, so I can load the damn bios or boot from CD with ease.)

43 seconds total to boot Win7 and all programs on Solid State Drive. Or 25 seconds to boot Windows.

2:20 minutes total to boot win7 and all programs on regular hard drive. Or 122 seconds to boot windows.

When I post stuff like this on the Sol clan boards, I can responses like:

'I can use internet'

or

'Is it an PC or a apple?'

*runs away*

mine is faster than your 122 seconds on a normal HD... by a lot... i'll time it next time i restart and report back

"Time!!!"

mine would be quite fast if my comp didn't show network adapter status and harddrives plugged to ide card during boot (each gets 10ish secs screentime).

Yeah but are we comparing apples and oranges. With the same settings and software loading on my computer the ssd is faster.

What sort of HD do you have a velocoraptor 10k rpm drive X:. However I have read that the latest Seagate ES and XT drives are really fast.

My config really isn't the fastest it can be;

1.) I have status screens set to display for a certain amount of time
2.) I have the computer check for CD boot which takes time
3.) The main boot drive is a regular HD until I select to load the OS on the SSD.
4.) Multiboot slows it down a bit as you have to select which os to boot.
5.) I have a password login screen on the windows.


On my laptop windows 7 ultimate set to load as fast as possible.

1.) Booting on the old hard drive took 1:20 minute
2.) Booting on the ancient 1st gen intel SSD took 28 seconds

nah i just have a WD Black 1TB

it's 39 seconds from BIOS beep to Win 7 login and 2 seconds from entering my pass immediately to desktop...


I believe mine checks for CD too; i also had to select windows 7 (over XP which it dual boots with until i have a chance to install some of the things i use on XP on 7)

laptop HD's are a different class, they're 5400 RPM not 7200, that's 50% slower as is, assuming the same densities (which should be the same for same generation drives)

The western digital black is a very good drive. Its got a dual processor o.O. Compared to a velociRaptor drive its really good value. Its quite impressive they have lowered the response time too. Its one of the top three HD drives on the market.

Its max read/write is 109mb whilst the intel ssd is 270/205 read write.

Though the vertex 3 ssd is more like 500mb/480mb read/write, however it will be less reliable than intel.

I was a bit disappointed that the intel SSD didn't have the sata III conection and stayed with sata II. Sata III would have boosted read performance. They focused on reliability instead;

Intel SSD 3rd gen: 0.4 failure rate per year* (sata II)
Vertex 3: failure rate ~2.2 (sata III)
WD black 1Tb: ~6% (sata III)

Though the WD black fail rate is one of the best, if not the best, for large harddrives >1TB. Some of the 3TB hard drives have a 12% failure rate per year.

The stats are from studies on the reliability, in the study Intel's ssd fail rate was 0.68%, though intel have done a lot to increase reliability with this generation. The 0.4 is intel's statistic. The MTBF for each drive is roughly the same though there are such large differences in the real world.

EDIT: the laptop had a 7200 rpm drive in it before.

For the record I wouldn't advise people to buy a SSD until 2015.

The price drops 30% every 2 years for SSD technology. Whilst its superior to harddrive in everyway, the problem is the price.

They cost a great deal more than traditional harddrives.

Also I would only recommend Intel drives if you are concerned about reliability. So far other brands haven't been stellar in terms of reliability, often other brands of SSDs have the same reliability as normal harddrives.

If you are crazy though you could buy enterprise SLC ssd drives which are the top of reliability and performance but cost crazy amounts of money.

They only cost a lot cause it's fairly new technology. Same thing happened with flash drives. They used to be $1/MB 9 years ago, now they're about $2/GB. Definitely give it 4-5 years though.

yea, they are changing insanely fast though
if you can hold off you'll get far better for the price

Well technically the technology is half as old as traditional hard drives. But the technology hasn't be commercially viable outside of specialised computing and super computers until the mid-90s. Even then It was only in the past 4 years that consumers could even buy them without selling their organs.

As a consumer end product, its very new. But its like the saying goes, yesterday's supercomputer is today's PC and tomorrow's smart phone. (updated slightly)