My last post was about some technical facts regarding the Crest 6 Master by Angelbird where I promised to publish some results of my daily-use test with using my Lenovo W500.

First of all, keep in mind that the disk isn’t running full speed as my controller only offers 223.24 MB/sec, which is about half of the disks speed, but still twice as fast as the old disk. The speed improvement was best running Linux after removing the prefetch and preload things.

KDE is loaded in a breeze and you really feel that the system reacts better – even when suffering heavy I/O load like unzipping kernel sources you are able to do common work whereas the old disk acted like a heavy handbrake. Even compile times went down by about 20% while the use of ccache now really kicks in due to the ‘lack’ of seek-times.

Windows 7 was a little bit disappointing for me, even after switching off any prefetchers found – especially after seeing that huge improvements on Linux. But nevertheless, the system as such is much more responsive. Due to the lack of spare time I’m not able to do a fresh installation of Windows to see if it’s just my install which grew that slow over time.

In the end I have to say, no matter if you are on Windows, Linux or anything else like OSX or BSD, the SSD is a big deal for daily use as we usually have to wait for the disk to read/write. The CPU limits aren’t hit too often.