Going solid state

I finally decide to invest in a Solid State Hard Drive or SSD and evaluate this technology and its prospects. As regular magnetic hard disk drive (HDD) prices have increased dramatically over the last couple of months, now seemed a good time to do so. I chose a relatively new Kingston 64GB V200 which closely approaches the £1 per Gigabyte limit. This has a modern controller that supports the future-proofing SATA III 6Gbps transfer speed and higher bandwidths for both read and write operations at an affordable and relatively low capacity level.

I considered testing it in three different environments; as a boot drive for a previous generation, fast quad core system; as a replacement drive for my DELL Vostro i5 Core laptop; and as a data drive for my gaming system. I installed Windows 7 on it in the first environment and though it improved boot times dramatically, though installing applications seemed a lot slower and general use about the same. This meant that I didn't replace the already fast 7,200rpm hard disk drive in my laptop because I didn't really see the point. It was fast enough and worked well already. Not worth the effort.

My gaming system already has 190GB used of the 500Gb system hard drive so the SSD wasn't going to replace that easily. I decided to add it as a game drive that I can fill at my leisure and will improve game start-up an level loading times. I'll report back on my findings.