Comments on: User Experience – SSD – Patriot Warp 32GB

By: Computer Price Trends

Computer Price Trends — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 01:53:23 +0000

Wow! $50.00 after MIR was a real steal back in March. 9 months later it still is as the same SSD drive retails for $120 and getting more expensive. When Windows 7 RTMed I decided that it's a good excuse to swap my Barracudas for a 256GB Corsair SSD and I consider it the best upgrade I've even had.

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:20 +0000

I thought a bit more about it after I posted and I came to the same conclusion you did about the loading times. I rarely shut down both computers and hardly ever reboot them either (makes me grow all nostalgic of Windows 98 grinding to a halt if you left it on overnight). I’m sure the times would be much slower if it was from a cold reboot.

By: charlie

charlie — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:45:51 +0000

Absolutely Richard. The 32GB I have is pretty limiting, but with a desktop at home and an MP3 player, I don’t feel the need to carry much of my media on the laptop itself. It becomes a very focused productivity machine. I have Office 2007, Visual Studio, Expression Studio 2, Visio, and Photoshop installed, along with some music and have about 10GB free. Still, I am looking forward to upgrading to something a bit larger down the road as prices continue to fall. Unfortunately, the $50 I paid for this drive has really skewed my expectations on price. The 32GB drives are still well over $100 so it’ll be a while before something larger falls to what I’d consider a reasonable level.

Those Photoshop numbers you mentioned, were they the first load of Photoshop after a reboot? Photoshop seems to cache large portions of itself after the first load. I measured 3.5s and under 2.5s for my desktop and laptop respectively upon subsequent loads. The numbers I posted were all for the initial load times after a reboot of the machines.

By: Richard

Richard — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:04:04 +0000

I’ve always contemplated switching over to a cheap SSD like the one that you found, but I could never quite get myself around the fact of having so little space. I know that with all the applications installed on my laptop I have only used about 15GB, but it’s the fact that I can’t carry around my pictures, movies, music, and games that really irks me. I don’t like to pick and choose and instead like to take everything with me. I like have 30GB+ free at all times on my laptop. Makes me feel reassured.

On a performance side note, I just loaded up Photoshop CS3 on my desktop and Photoshop CS4 on my laptop (both ~2.2GHz, 4GB RAM, Vista and Win7 respectively). I was getting load times of just under 3 seconds for CS3 and under 2.5 seconds for CS4. Just saying…