Hundred Hand

Well it happened; prices finally came down on flash harddrives enough that it met my criteria to purchase one. I went with the Corsair 128gb SATA (price, $325), which was large enough to comfortably let me hold my OS, all the games I play regularaly (WoW is 30gb by itself), and still have about 40gb to spare. I haven’t done any direct speed tests, but as a whole, my computer just feels much more fluid.

Starting up Windows 7 now takes 13 seconds, from first MS logo, to sitting at my desktop ready to check the internet. My bios itself takes about another 10 seconds, so it’s a total of 23 seconds before I’m ready to use my computer. This works pretty well for me, because it takes me almost exactly 23 seconds to find a pair of shorts and a t-shirt put them on so I can sit down at my computer in the morning.

Other programs, like Photoshop, open up in 2 seconds, IE8 opens in 1 second, and Chrome appears to startup in negative time. iTunes still takes a number of seconds to start, but it’s because I keep my music collection on my standard platter based harddrive, and I can hear the little clicks as it’s loading up my library.

One area where I expected a larger improvement is in game loading times. I’m talking mainly about those screens where you are just sitting, looking at a loading bar. They seem good, but not nearly as improved as everything else. Specifically in the Starcraft II beta, when a match is about to start, you can see all the other players loading progress. Relative to other players, I load equally as fast. As far as I understand, much of what is loaded is coming from your harddrive, and going into the video RAM on your graphics card. Perhaps the VRAM is the bottleneck there?

Has anyone else gotten to test out one of these SSD drives? What are your thoughts?