Got My First SSD!

I just got my first SSD by Intel – Intel 320 Series 120GB @ RM 599. Meanwhile, I also upgraded my RAM from 4GB to 8GB as well as upgrading my heat sink fan to Noctua C12P-SE14.

It was really a pain to clone one of my partition over from my existing WD Green 1TB. Even tried using PartedMagic to copy it over but ended up with MBR Error 1 when I try to boot up with my cloned SSD. Kept on trying until I gave up and installed a clean Windows 7.

With Ninite and cloud sync, it take not as long as I expected to get back up to pace.

Here’s my unofficial testing of my performance comparison between WD Green 1TB and Intel 320 Series 120GB SSD.

The timer starts when I press the power button and up to my Windows 7 logon screen, paused the timer and enter my password. As soon as I press enter with my password keyed-in, timer is resumed until my Desktop is loaded and usable.

With HDD, it used 1 minutes 56 seconds to boot up while SSD used a merely 38.3 seconds including launching of WLM. Later on, I tried again by adding Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Google Earth into the startup, it took 41.7 seconds until I was able to see a “New” window in Photoshop with shortcut key Ctrl+N.

The heat sink fan improved my CPU’s load temperature by well more than 10C from the stock cooler from Intel. And my CPU is Intel Core i5 2500.

SSD is definitely a great upgrade to increase your productivity. Not a bad investment at all!