For a while I have been harping on about how much difference a speedy hard drive can make to a developer’s PC. So, I took my own advice, and recently coughed up the cash for a new Crucial 2.5 inch 256GB solid state drive. You could argue that doing this was even going two / three times better than my previously recommended solution of a Western Digital Velociraptor (10,000rpm). The performance difference is astounding!
Here’s the obligatory Windows Experience Index (WEI): 7.3 for the drive (the highest rated item on my Laptop). 
Previously, the one of the fastest available magnetic drives for laptops (2.5 inch form factor) was the Western Digital Scorpio Black, 7200rpm drive, which previously scored 5.7 in the Windows Experience Index on my laptop. Admittedly the WEI isn’t a very scientific benchmark, but it is based on an all-round measurement (both sequential & random read/write). The Crucial SSD is, in theory, around 3-times faster at average sequential reads than the Scorpio Black (the Crucial reads at between 230 MB/sec and 250 MB/sec, whereas the Scorpio Black reads at between 63 MB/sec and 76 MB/sec). Most people’s typical usage is not based on one extreme or the other between sequential or random IO though. Between the operating system and our applications, we do a little of everything.
Subjective review
While having specific performance measurements might help prove one drive is better than another, most of us will probably judge how much faster one drive “feels” in our system. For example, I’ve noticed that my laptop tends not to wait on disk IO anymore and if my processor was faster, I might be feeling the benefit of my new Crucial SSD even more than I am now, and its already made a big difference to me. I don’t play games on this laptop, so if anything feels like a bottleneck, its the Core 2 Duo 2.5Ghz processor. Now that data comes off the disk so fast, single threaded applications seem to end up waiting for the CPU.
I’ve also always used my Disklight.NET system-tray application on all my PC’s, to keep an eye on when my hard drive is holding up my PC. At work, my PC is under my desk, so when its being slow or unresponsive, it’s nice to have something to tell me when it’s waiting on disk IO. Most of the time, I hardly ever saw this application show more than 25 MB/sec on any of my machines with magnetic-platter hard disks. On the right is a screenshot of the readings when starting up a Windows XP virtual machine on my laptop (by the way, the XP virtual machine boots in about 9 seconds). I’ve even seen “Read:” values as high as 168 MB/sec when running backup software that scans my music library.
Power consumption & other benefits
The other main plus sides for solid state drives:
- typically consume about 0.5W of power, whereas most magnetic drives will consume anywhere from 2W to 15W. Therefore, they will help extend battery life in laptops.
- do not get hot
- no noise
- no moving parts, therefore failure rates are lower
- less risk from physical impact & movement because there are no moving parts
- lighter (reduces weight in laptops)