First SSD - OCZ Vertex Plus
For personal laptops I've had a Gateway Solo 2500 with a 4GB hard drive and currently have a HP DV2 with a 500GB drive. For work I've had a Lenovo T42 and currently have a Lenovo x60s. I've had the x60s for 2 years now and the 60 GB hard drive is showing its age. The drive was very slow and you could hear it when it was seeking. It was time for an upgrade.
A decided to get a 120GB OCZ Vertex Plus because it was being offered at a good price. After purchasing, I began to read up on the drive originally thinking it had a Sandforce Gen1 chip in it. After some further research I learned it had a Indilinx Martini chipset. I looked over some benchmarks for this chipset and the results looked promising and since the drive is going into an x60s which only has sata 1, the speeds were more than enough to fully utilize the connection.
I then began to read through forums regarding the drive and found lots of people with issues for the drive ranging from not being able to install and OS to getting corrupt data crashing the OS. I found that the latest firmware seemed to be stable and drives running older versions tended to have issues.
I received mine and was eager to install it and test it out. I put it into my x60 and tried booting to run the update for the firmware to check what version the SSD was and update it to the latest. This is where I ran into my first issue, the CD wouldn't boot into the FreeDOS which is all configured from OCZ. I couldn't get the firmware updated so I just decided to install Windows XP. I started the CD and reached the intial point of creating the partitions and it wouldn't work. I selected to create a partition and it would not do it.
Next put the SSD into my HP laptop and tried to update the firmware on it and ran into the same issue. I then proceeded to install Xubuntu on the machine because I wanted to see the SSD in use. It was amazing how fast things loaded. I was not disappointed. After doing some playing around and enjoying the new speeds I then did some more reading on how to update the firmware and found a guide for updating the firmware from a flash drive.
Once I had the drives firmware updated to 3.55, I then put it back into my x60s and attempted to install Windows XP again. This time I had no issues installing Windows XP. The firmware update fixed the issue. After installing XP and after getting all my applications & drivers installed I was shocked at how fast the system was still booting. With all my startup applications it used to take over 3 minutes after I logged in to have everything up and running. Launching my web browser would take at least 10 seconds & Outlook would take at least the same. Now, with the SSD, it hardly take two seconds to launch the browser and less than 30 seconds from the BIOS to being completely logged in.
The Lenovo x60s does only have a sata 1 controller so it does limit the capabilities of the OCZ SSD but the performance is such an improvement over the old drive that those limitations don't matter to me. The drive performs fast and for the cost was a great improvement over what I had.
Now that I have had a taste of the benefits of an SSD drive, I doubt I will ever be able to go back to using a hard disk drive as my boot disk ever again. I am hooked on the speed benefits that the SSD drive has to offer. If you are on the fence of getting an SSD unsure whether or not it will offer a large enough speed increase then you should make the leap because it is well worth it.
A decided to get a 120GB OCZ Vertex Plus because it was being offered at a good price. After purchasing, I began to read up on the drive originally thinking it had a Sandforce Gen1 chip in it. After some further research I learned it had a Indilinx Martini chipset. I looked over some benchmarks for this chipset and the results looked promising and since the drive is going into an x60s which only has sata 1, the speeds were more than enough to fully utilize the connection.
I then began to read through forums regarding the drive and found lots of people with issues for the drive ranging from not being able to install and OS to getting corrupt data crashing the OS. I found that the latest firmware seemed to be stable and drives running older versions tended to have issues.
I received mine and was eager to install it and test it out. I put it into my x60 and tried booting to run the update for the firmware to check what version the SSD was and update it to the latest. This is where I ran into my first issue, the CD wouldn't boot into the FreeDOS which is all configured from OCZ. I couldn't get the firmware updated so I just decided to install Windows XP. I started the CD and reached the intial point of creating the partitions and it wouldn't work. I selected to create a partition and it would not do it.
Next put the SSD into my HP laptop and tried to update the firmware on it and ran into the same issue. I then proceeded to install Xubuntu on the machine because I wanted to see the SSD in use. It was amazing how fast things loaded. I was not disappointed. After doing some playing around and enjoying the new speeds I then did some more reading on how to update the firmware and found a guide for updating the firmware from a flash drive.
Once I had the drives firmware updated to 3.55, I then put it back into my x60s and attempted to install Windows XP again. This time I had no issues installing Windows XP. The firmware update fixed the issue. After installing XP and after getting all my applications & drivers installed I was shocked at how fast the system was still booting. With all my startup applications it used to take over 3 minutes after I logged in to have everything up and running. Launching my web browser would take at least 10 seconds & Outlook would take at least the same. Now, with the SSD, it hardly take two seconds to launch the browser and less than 30 seconds from the BIOS to being completely logged in.The Lenovo x60s does only have a sata 1 controller so it does limit the capabilities of the OCZ SSD but the performance is such an improvement over the old drive that those limitations don't matter to me. The drive performs fast and for the cost was a great improvement over what I had.
Now that I have had a taste of the benefits of an SSD drive, I doubt I will ever be able to go back to using a hard disk drive as my boot disk ever again. I am hooked on the speed benefits that the SSD drive has to offer. If you are on the fence of getting an SSD unsure whether or not it will offer a large enough speed increase then you should make the leap because it is well worth it.
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