OCZ drive
Last year, I took advantage of the student promotion to buy a Windows 7 upgrade license for my Toshiba M700 tablet PC. Since I was at the middle of the previous semester, I thought it wise to postpone the upgrade after the semester, but before the start of the next one. I also decided that since I am at it, might as well upgrade the drive on the computer from a HDD to SSD.
I have been curious to go SSD for quite sometime now, but has been discouraged by its higher price ratio per gigabyte compared to hard drives. Prices for SSD have not really gone down yet as expected, in fact, prices of flash drives, including RAM have been relatively high compared to a couple of months back. But I reasoned that the intial high cost of going SDD is justified by having a computer that will be less prone to having a drive crash and wipe out all your data.
As everyone probably knows, HDDs are mechanical drives with moving parts, and is prone to failure if the platter gets damaged. On the other hand, SDD does not have any moving parts, so that you don’t have to worry about the occasional bumps to your computer while it is accessing the drive. Other benefits are speed, less heat, and relatively lighter than a hard drive.
So with that in mind, I purchased a OCZ 60GB 2.5″ Vertex series SSD at MicroCenter. Aside from an instant discount offered by the store, the manufacturer also tacked in a $30 MIR, further making the purchase a little sweeter. I got this drive because it received quite favorable reviews, with read and write speeds of 230MB/sec and 135MB/sec, respectively. It also has a cache of 64MB and has an indilinx controller that is known to be stutter-free. Also, I think 60GB is the lowest I can go in terms of a primary drive especially since a Windows 7 install can take 10GB upwards of space.
I will be posting a step-by-step account of my upgrade of the Toshiba M700 in the next few days, but for now here are some pictures of the drive.
Vertex series SSD
Vertex SSD and the Fujitsu HDD
Vertex drive inside the guts of the M700
