I have finally got one of these things. I have installed them in client machines and I’ve seen how fast they make a machine but I have not gotten one for myself yet to really beat on it. I just received mine and installed it. Now I didn’t go with the highest end Samsung 850 PRO SATA SSD I could get. Nevertheless the results are astonishing:
1. Boot times are really fast. Instead of nearly 5 minutes to have everything loaded at the desktop it now take less than 2.
2. Web surfing is fast. All modern browsers rely heavily on a local disk cache for performance. I usually open 54 tabs at once in Chrome every morning. This normally takes about 3 minutes to load everything. I tried it just now and it took less than 60 seconds. Now the cpu is pegged and the system is “hung” while it is sucking in all of this data and the SSD it just chewing through it like it wasn’t there…but that’s a minor thing for the speed..:)
3. Large program installs are REALLY fast. I just installed the entire Office 2013 Office Pro Plus suite including Visio in less than 3 minutes…:) Cannot wait to try Quickbooks.
For networked environments local storage is the biggest bottleneck. Folks are throwing faster cpu’s at their systems and that is the wrong focus point many times. SATA is being maxed out by modern SSD drives and the market is beginning to shift to PCI-e based SSD drives but the SATA drives are more than fast enough for a typical SMB workstation. SSD’s are not ready for typical SMB servers though due to data integrity questions after long times of being powered off in hot environments.
If you want a evaluation of your systems performance performed with the latest knowledge of the various facets of hardware and network performance contact ETC Maryland for an evaluation and further recommendations.