How to clone your Notebook / MacBook Hard Disk to an SSD

Benchmarks & Conclusion

Published: 11th August 2009 | Source: Overclock3D | Author: James Napier

Benchmarks

Now that we've got the installation out of the way let's check out some of the benchmark results from our Dell Inspiron 1525 Notebook before and after the SSD upgrade.

Starting off with some results from CrystalDiskMark, the performance difference between the OCZ SSD and the WD Hard Disk in the read results is astranomical. Both the sequential and 512k read results are over 100MB/s higer, and even when reading small files (4k) the SSD is over 40x faster. The 4k and 512k write results are a little bit closer, with the SSD edging out the HDD by just a small percentage, but this is soon put to rest in the sequential results where the SSD performs over 30MB/s faster.

PCMark is a real world benchmark that automates and measures some of the tasks commonly performed on a PC. Once again the OCZ SSD wipes the floor with the Western Digital Scorpio Hard Disk in all of the tests with the Virus Scan results being the most pronounced due to yet another >100MB/s advantage for the SSD drive. The rest of the results are all between 5-10x higher for the SSD drive aside from the File Write results, which as we saw from the CrystalDiskMark ones above, were a slightly closer call.

Finally I'm going to round things off with some actual 'Loading Time' results which will hopefully put all of the above figures into some perspective. These results were collected using a stopwatch after a clean start-up of Windows (to prevent anything from being cached to RAM). Although I can't throw around any wild 100MB/s faster or 10x quicker stats this time, the SSD did boot into Windows a whole 12 seconds faster and load Photoshop CS3 10 seconds faster. However, for applications such as Firefox and Microsoft Office, the difference of 2-4 seconds was less easier to notice.

Conclusion

Hopefully you will have already seen quite a substantial increase in performance on the start-up of your Notebook and opening of applications now that you're up and running on an SSD. However, there are certain things you need to make sure you do/don't do to ensure that the performance isn't degraded over time and that the life of your SSD drive is prolonged. For example, you should NEVER run a standard Hard Disk defragmentation tool. These can drastically reduce the life of your SSD, which is something you certainly don't want after forking out all that money. Instead look up tools such as TRIM and diskpar (if you're running Windows XP).

Unfortunately the amount of information surrounding the maintenance of SSD drives is way beyond the scope of this article, so your best bet is to head over to our forums for any specific advice. Of course, you can also drop by the forum and try to grab my attention if you have any issues with this guide or need any help picking the tools for the job.

Jimbo out!