Well, I did indeed rave over the Seagate hybrid drive last post. And it likely deserves it. But when push came to shove, I decided to drop my dough on the full-0n SSD – the big brother of the hybrid, if you will.

Of course, it’s only 80GB vs 500GB for the Seagate.

That being said, after I cleared off my HDD, did some creative backing up, moved all my media files over to the HDD, I still have 24GB free. This is with all my apps installed, Windows 7 64-bit, and enough games to keep me occupied for a long time.

The most impressive thing about this is speed. With the specs that my computer has, I don’t think there’s any other upgrade I could have purchased that would have given me such a noticeable increase in speed. I already have a quad-core 3.1ghz processor and 4GB of RAM, but I suppose I could have bought a new processor. The price would have been huge as it would have necessitated new RAM, a new motherboard, etc. And I don’t think it would have made the whole OS as snappy as the SSD has.

To give you an idea of how snappy, from off to my Win7 desktop, it takes 21 seconds. 9 of that was staring at my POST. So we’re talking a 12 second boot. That is crazy-fast.  Everything else has sped up as well; all my apps start in record time, compared to previously. Open Office starts in less than a second, without running the ‘speed start’ program at boot.

What a fantastic tech. Here’s hoping the price will come down enough and the sizes will enlarge enough for them to go mainstream.

For those inclined to care, here’s a quick benchmark in AS SSD. This was done in IDE drive mode as I installed Win7 without switching this over the AHCI and I got a pretty BSOD when I tried to switch it afterwards.