SSD preformance

I'm thinking about buying an SSD but I was wondering, Will my whole computer increase in speed or will only the items stored on the SSD?

you should find that your computer will boot up faster and your programs will start-up quicker.

in simple terms, this is because during boot and application startup, windows needs to load lots of small files from the drive into memory. with an ssd, these files are accessed and loaded much much quicker than with an old-fashioned spinning hard-drive.

it won't 'speed up your whole computer' in the sense that games (for example) won't run any faster, but they will load laster - so rather than waiting say ten seconds for a game or program to become usable, it'll be only a couple of seconds instead.

i don't think i've heard of anyone regretting buying an ssd. speaking for myself, i won't go back to a hard-drive for windows, although i have kept my old hdd for mass storage of things like music and movies, where speed isn't essential - i don't need to watch my films at high speed. :)

I'm not sure what you mean by your whole computer, in terms of performance speeding up. Obviously, things not related to the SSD wouldn't speed up. For example, a game that's GPU dependent isn't going to give you more FPS. You're DVD drive isn't going to suddenly burn faster. You won't be downloading from the internet any faster. Loading multimedia files from another drive won't be any faster. Apps running on the SSD will open faster. If the OS resides on the SSD it will boot faster, and should seem snappier.

Consider it like a car. Upgrading the engine won't somehow make the stereo sound better or the seats more comfortable. It only deals with what the engine controls. Using an SSD for your primary drive will have an effect on anything related to the primary drive.

Like the others have said, you'll see the difference in bootup times and application loading. It's amazing to see bloated Office apps heaved up onto the screen almost instantly (as fast as opening Notepad usually is).

What I'm getting from most of you is that you SSD is on your primary slot (the one with your operating system on it). Right now, mine is on my really bad HDD, is there anyway, if I buy an SSD that I can move my operating system from my HDD to the SSD?

illway1 said:

Right now, mine is on my really bad HDD, is there anyway, if I buy an SSD that I can move my operating system from my HDD to the SSD?

You can clone or image your HDD and restore the image to your new SSD but you have to worry about getting the partition offset right. You can google about partition offset (partition offset and ssd) to see what I'm talking about. This thread is a good guide:
SSD Tweaks and Optimizations in Windows 7

However, if you do a clean install of Windows 7 onto your new SSD it will automatically give a correct partition offset. A clean installation is always best, in my opinion.

Yep, you can definitely clone the drive, but you'd be better off doing a fresh install on an SSD. Don't worry...people make it out to be a huge deal to do a clean install, but if you have your drivers and apps ready ahead of time, you can do it in under 2 hours.

don't know if WEI is a good guide, but my SSD performance has gone from 7.3 down to 6.8 over the last year..