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SSD. I couldn’t resist with all the hype and all. Despite serious shortages I managed to find a retail Intel X25-M G2 80GB. For the price difference you get a shiny box, not four but actually five screws of each type, and a 2.5 to 3.5 adapter. What a caper. Anyhow, installation of Windows 7 went well after I had done some reading, aligning the partition with diskpar. Preliminary partioning became 30 – 33 – 11.5 GB. With the last 11.5 GB left unallocated for now. I will have to do some more reading on whether or not TRIM changes longterm performance enough to utilize the entire drive. 30 GB for Windows may seem slim, but I did run XP on a 30 Gb partition and that has worked fine. Even with Windows 7 consuming 12 GB after a fresh install, it adds up if you move RAW camera files (about 10GB at any given time) off of the boot drive (and hopefully to a NAS) and don’t let a bunch of games (like UT3) pollute the documents folder.
Before (rough estimation):
After (rough estimation):
Remember though that the SSD isn’t encrypted (yet). That could even out the odds a bit. Plus, as we all know, SSDs performance will deteriorate over time. Especially on this drive, until Intel decided to re-release the TRIM firmware. Duh, I just realized it shipped with the 02HA firmware. Everything is a-OK on the OS side so TRIM is active and working!
Read speeds, as expected are through the roof. Write speeds are lackluster and will likely drop over time if the disk is left unattended. There are plenty of SSDs with faster write speeds, but overall, and particularly if you count 4K performance and access times, the X25 is the only option. For obvious reasons, the less you write to the disk the better. Even with TRIM. I will consider moving all sorts of disk intensive programs and files off of the boot drive (RAW camera files, browser cache) onto a traditional hard drive. If I can’t use memory caching for browsers altogether. Not so keen on my current 500 GB Samsung T166 though because of vibrations. A new green drive would be a lot better. Most games will have to live on the D: drive to take advantage of SSD load speeds. Swap will of course stay because it works wonderfully with SSD. I have locked that in at 2 GB anyway.
For the curious, Windows 7 installed in about 15min on this drive. Even though I felt copying files from USB went slower than expected. Booting W7 is fast, like 20 seconds or so. Timing the entire boot (including POST) shows about 46 seconds at best with all drivers and software installed. One think that I especially noticed was that the sleep (S3) mode now worked a lot faster. Though it takes a few seconds longer to engage (might be tweakable further, have already turned off hybrid sleep of course), coming out of S3 is near instantaneous so far as I can tell. My monitor simply isn’t fast enough, especially when connected to a master-slave outlet. But looking at what happens on the G15 keyboard’s display, things are really snappy.
The conclusion is of course that the SSD is plenty fast where it matters. Now the question is how I will go about encrypting the drive. There are a lot of pitfalls with SSDs in this regard. But also some theoretical perks. I wish Truecrypt had the repair features and wide support of Bitlocker (now compatible with Symantec Norton Ghost for instance). Alternatively that Bitlocker worked more like Truecrypt with a simple (though preferably insanely long) password even for system encryption. I don’t have TPM and I don’t see the point. Nor do I want to have a USB key that I insert at every boot? How secure is that anyway? Is the USB stick identifiable for starters? How does that protect me against and an entry and search attack from lets say law enforcement? Any idiot would know how Bitlocker works and start looking for USB sticks. I guess you could hide the recovery key in the woods in a seal container, and use a real flimsy USB stick that you could destroy if it ever came to that. Using a storm lighter? Also, afaik Bitlocker still requires and automatically creates a special partition. That is pretty lame.
On the other hand, Truecrypt throws a monkey wrench into TRIM, so that is a bit of a deal breaker as well since imaging the drive back and forth every so often becomes near impossible with system encryption. Keeping an unallocated chunk of the drive may help here, but I think this warrants further investigation.
