Overview
August 10, 2013
System as purchased:
- Dell Inspiron 660
- Intel i5 Quad Core
- 1TB HDD
- Windows 7 64 bit
- Boot Time: 50 seconds
- Hybernation Wake Up: 21 seconds
August 15, 2013I purchased a 128GB SSD from Newegg. The Sandisk SSD was on sale for $90 and free shipping, which was about as good as I could find in a quick search. It arrived in 3 days.
The first problem I hit was installation. The SSD is 2.5" so I bought an adapter. Unfortunately I haven't figured out how make it work. The SSD fits in the adapter and is held quite securely. The adapter won't fit in my drive bay. There are metal tabs in the drive bay, but no corresponding slots or spaces in the adapter, It was late last night. I'll try again and see if I am missing something. For right now the drive is just loose in the computer case..
I was surprised that the drive didn't appear when it was installed. After looking around a bit, and figuring out how to get into BIOS setup on a Dell (F2) I realized the drive was not formatted. Hmm. I thought most drives were these days. It took all of about a minute to quick format the drive (1 second to format and 59 for me to work my way through the Microsoft menus).
I downloaded a trial version of EaseUS ToDo Backup and cloned my HDD onto the SSD, went back into the BIOS to tell it to boot from the SSD and Voila! It works!
The results are as follows Condition HDD SSD Cold Boot 50 sec 20 sec Hibernation 21 sec 22 sec It's interesting that there is no change when waking from hibernation and the time is the same as a cold boot. I assume the small differences in time are my finger on the stopwatch.
I haven't actually used the computer since I installed it last night, so I can't say if there is a noticeable performance improvement. If I see something interesting I'll post an update.
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