I've been feeling the slow pinch on my laptop recently, and decided to upgrad to the hybrid SSD drives to see how much they improved things. The short answer is quite a bit - it's dramatically improved some things. The results from my own testing of my laptop are detailed below. I tested by cloning my old harddrive to the new Seagate drive - Hitachi HTS723232L9A360 (320G SATA2 3Gbs 7200rpm) to Seagate Momentus XT 320Gb 7200rpm…
Some numbers (these are taken using a stopwatch, me typing to login etc so this is obviously highly unscientific, but still interesting). Times are in seconds.
|
|
Hitachi |
Seagate XT Boot #1 |
Seagate XT Boot #2 |
|
Bios |
19.3 |
15.0 |
15.9 |
|
Windows Login prompt |
78 |
136 |
55.3 |
|
Desktop fully loaded |
121 |
122 |
51 |
|
Totals (total / OS) |
218.3 / 199 |
273 / 258 |
122.2 / 106.3 |
|
% change over fastest (OS only) |
187.2% |
242.71% |
100% |
|
Start Outlook to Outlook fully loaded |
39.9 |
40.1 |
32.8 |
|
Exit outlook, wait for outlook process to terminate |
|
|
|
|
Start Outlook again wait for fully load |
6 |
3 |
3 |
|
Leave Outlook Open, start Firefox (no browser page loading) |
16.9 |
4 |
4 |
|
Close FF, wait for process to terminate |
|
|
|
|
Open FF again |
2.4 |
1 |
1 |
Some environmental notes:
- Laptop is HP Elitebook 8530W (C2Duo 2.93Ghz)
- 4G DDR2
- Gigabit network, all wireless antennaes disabled
- USB hub plugged in with keyboard / mouse
- Win 7 x64
- Office 2010 x32
- FireFox 8.01 (Release channel)
- Kaspersky Enterprise 6.0.4
- Computer is connected to domain, logged on as domain user. Profile is local (not roaming).
So… still not the fastest laptop under the sun, but I’ll happily take that performance improvement! I deliberately went for the same sized HDD so that I can use the old one as a backup drive (will get it to clone across regularly).
It's also interesting to see how long BIOS takes to load (which is why I split out the total vs windows times above) – the new ultra books booting in 2 seconds are obviously going to have to improve a whole lot on the non-OS component let alone the OS load times!
So, the verdict? The Hybrid SSD makes a lot of difference to things that I'm doing regularly on the laptop - making it noticeably faster, and it's a much cheaper upgrade than a new laptop.
-- Chris
