SSDs are highly praised for their boot speed, so I would have been remiss had I relied solely on a standardized test. range, Crucial forged ahead at 120.7MB/sec. While the two mechanical drives and the Ridata SSD posted average reads in the 54MB-to-55MB/sec. Advanced Media's Ridata drive trailed the pack at a leisurely 71.2MB/sec. The Crucial SSD came in second at 137.3MB/sec., but the desktop Barracuda and its 135MB/sec. It was the mechanical Momentus drive that scored the highest burst speed at 214.3MB/sec. I used HD Tach to test the drives' performance - and got some interesting results. Vista Home Premium occupied about 12GB of space.
The software uses dynamic partitioning, making the differences between the 250GB, 200GB and 32GB devices irrelevant. mechanical Seagate drive using Apricorn Inc.'s DriveWire hard drive adapter and Easy Gig II hardware/software package. desktop drive, fully updated the installation and then cloned that drive to each of the SSDs and the 2.5-in. To make sure I was working from an even playing field, I installed a fresh copy of Windows Vista Home Premium on the 3.5-in.
When I got back to the lab and checked my pockets, the official list looked like this: and Crucial Technology into loaning me their 32GB SSDs and convinced Seagate Technology LLC to hand over a sample of its 3.5-in.
So have you ever wondered if it's really worth it to plunk down the extra $1,300 for an SSD-equipped MacBook Air? Or have you been tempted to swap the current mechanical hard drive out of your portable and slide one of these high tech bad boys inside? I did. (That's a bit of an oversimplification, but it's fair.) Working off an electrical grid, there's no time wasted positioning the read/write head and then waiting for it to settle down and start doing its thing. They should also (again, in theory) be faster than a mechanical hard drive at just about anything. There's no platter rotation or read/write head motion so SSDs - in theory - should use less power than equivalent mechanical hard drives. Having no moving parts is, naturally, important. mechanical laptop drive and have a SATA interface for an easy connection to the internals of your portable. Like USB drives, they use nonvolatile flash memory to store data, but SSDs are wrapped in an enclosure the size of a 2.5-in. They easily distinguish themselves from the mechanical hard drives of the Jurassic period because they have no moving parts. Solid-state disks (SSD) are probably some of the most talked-about new gadgets of late.