I’m considering switching the old harddisk in my wife’s laptop to a SSD, but like in most things in life: there’s way too much to choose from for the uninitiated. A co-worker was kind enough to let me try out his “old” Intel SSD (which is about a month old or so), thanks Leon.

So, since the dear local government is busy with the usual all-important-life-or-death surfing for the evening I spent a few minutes switching the drive into my own laptop for comparison. I can’t say that it’s very scientific measurements, but at least I can say there’s some crystal clear differences between the two.

I did a fresh Ubuntu Desktop 10.10 installation on the SSD (which btw, took just a few minutes) which I compared against my current Ubuntu 10.10 installation on the 7200 rpm 160 gb Western Digital. Yes, yes – I’m aware that I’ve got a bunch of custom configuration things and services on the “real” HDD and absolutely nothing but a clean installation on the SSD.

Harddisk models:
Intel SSD 2.5 inch X25-M 120GB MLC SATA300 (SSDSA2M120G2GC)
Western Digital HDD 160GB SATA 7200 rpm (WD1600BEKT-60F3T1)
(I’ll just call them SSD and WD respectively, because the full names are a mouthful to say the least.)

Time to login screen from power on
WD: about 44 seconds
SSD: around 19 seconds

I used the disk utility included with Ubuntu for the read tests.

Min read speed:
WD: 40,3 mb/s
SSD: 137 mb/s

Max read speed:
WD: 87,8 mb/s
SSD: 140,6 mb/s

Average read speed:
WD: 67,0 mb/s
SSD:  139,4 mb/s

Starting to see a pattern?

Here are the mandatory screenshots of the performance tests:

WD 160gb 7200rpm info

WD 160gb 7200rpm performance read test

Intel 120gb SSD info

Intel 120gb SSD performance read test

Edit: Added another screenshot of an old Hitachi 160gb 5400rpm IDE drive, accessed via USB.

Hitachi 160gb 5400rpm IDE read performance