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Finally!

Since the first time I heard about this revolutionizing new hard drive technology I’ve been longing for the day these would become accessible for normal people. It’s been a long wait, but today my OCZ Sata2 SSD disk finally arrived.

I’m normally a patient kind of guy, but when the lady standing before me in the line at the post office wanted to get back a letter she accidentally had posted and the guy behind the counter started going through a postbag looking for it I almost hit both of them in the head.. Anyway, the disk is here and installed in my laptop and I’m amazed by the increased responsiveness of my system!

Of course I had to do a few benchmarks as well. Before the disk arrived I killed some time installing Ubuntu 8.04.1 (Hardy Heron) onto my laptop to have a fresh install to compare with. After getting and installing the new SSD disk I did the same thing so all benchmarks are run on a fresh Ubuntu install with all available updates installed. My old disk was a traditional Toshiba 100GB 5400 RPM disk in my ThinkPad Z60m.

Before installing the SSD disk I was most curious about how much the boot time would improve. The disk did not disappoint, on the fresh install the boot time was reduced from 28 to 20 seconds, or about 30%. I’ve used the amazing bootchart tool to do this benchmark. This tool visualizes the boot process making you able to locate any bottlenecks.

Boot visualizing with traditional Toshiba disk

Boot visualizing with new OCZ SSD disk

As you can read from the charts the system uses a lot less time waiting for IO with the SSD disk (due to the low latency) and the “old” single-core CPU in my laptop becomes much more of a bottleneck during the boot process. Another interesting thing to notice is that the SSD disk is able to read about three times as many MB per second as the traditional disk. Where the mechanical disk uses most of it’s time moving the head around the disk the SSD disk can spend more time feeding the CPU with data.

With a faster dual-core CPU I’m convinced that I would have seen even better boot times. I think it’s important to point out that this is on a fresh system install. After you’ve installed all your applications you will have a lot more services starting up during the boot and the improved boot time will be much more noticeable.

Installing an SSD disk in you system is probably the best performance upgrade you can give your system these days. I read somewhere that Google are switching from old mechanical disks in theirs servers these days so this is absolutely the way to go! As the SSD controllers continue to mature I’m sure we’ll see disks able to read well above 2-300 MB per second. And maybe more importantly when the manufacturers are able to increase production to increase the demand we’ll might see bigger disks to a smaller price.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: After using the disk for everyday opearations it’s clear that it sucks on random write operations! Unpacking archives and installing applications or software updates is a nightmare with this disk and I do not recomend it!