Last week I found a good deal on Newegg on a 40GB Intel Solid State Drive (Intel X25-V SSDSA2MP040G2R5 2.5″ 40GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive). I got it on sale for $100 with free shipping.

Here is the link to it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025

For those of you who don’t know what a Solid State Drive is, I will briefly explain.

A Solid State Drive, or SSD, is a storage medium that uses flash memory instead of disk platters to store data. Unlike Hard Drives, SSD’s do not contain moving parts. Solid State Drives typically have much faster read times than a hard drive. However, a hard drive will normally have faster write times.

The end result of the faster read times is your computer will respond faster to opening applications and booting up. Although a SSD will have slower write times, this is not a huge deal because of write caching. Write caching is where your operating system holds data to be written to the disk in RAM until there is free write time available. The danger of this however is you could lose data in the event of a sudden power outage. Luckily that is not a concern for me since my computer is backed up with a UPS (it will continue running during a power outage). My UPS will tell my computer “hey you are running on battery power” and the OS will respond by flushing its write cache to the disk.

I have not had a lot of time to test how much faster things are but I can say that one application I use a lot which is Dreamweaver opens in 1 second or less. This application when it was on my hard drive took about 5-10 seconds to load. Windows 7 boots cold to the desktop (ready to use) in 20 seconds.

How I have this setup is my operating system and all applications files are stored on the 40GB SSD. All my other data like downloads, music, movies, and everything else is still stored on normal Hard Drives.

All in all I am very happy so far with my Solid State Drive.