Solid State Drives and joy

[johnpalmer]

1) Get a solid state drive - they're not cheap, but they're not super-expensive.
2) Make sure your SATA controller is set to AHCI - *not* IDE or ATA emulation. SSDs are fast, but IDE/ATA emulation slows them down.
3) Connect your solid state drive.
4) Start Windows 7 installer to set up a clean install
5) Go do some laundry, because it's going to take a long time.
6) Come back in 20 minutes, and curse - something's wrong with your brand new SSD! Look, the installer *crashed* and *restarted*.
7) Note that it's passing strange for your computer to claim Windows files are already there...
8) Realize that in the 20 minutes you were gone, Windows *completed installing* and now boots in about 30 seconds.
9) Get upset because you have to work and will have to spend over 9 hours away from your upgraded toy....

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I think I'll want to check back with you sometime fairly soon. This looks like a good idea.

Another SSD story

[wyang.livejournal.com]

I actually have bought two SSDs. My first one was really cheap, and I failed to properly optimize my Linux OS for it, and the wrtie/rewrite cycles killed the disk, or so it appeared.

However, I bought a second, much higher end Intel disk the second time around. Now, my netbook's Linux installation boots in 9 seconds and writes to disk only to commit real data and system changes. It took me about 2 days to figure out how to make everything work as well as I wanted... but it added 30% to my battery life and the system is almost infinitely faster. Can't complain about that....

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

ssd - just say 'I'm never going back to spinning disk'

windows 7 install takes about 12 minutes