Review on Intel Solid State Drive SATA 2 5 Inch by Marcus Amillion

I resisted the urge to get an SSD for a few years and finally made the switch. I held off until the MTBF increased significantly compared to a while ago. Also, the affordability trend has made it very tempting. A trusted friend just installed it and reported amazing performance, so I figured it was time to jump in. The short version boils down to this: Using Intel OEM/Acronis Migration Assistant made this complete easy migration from an existing Windows 7 installation on magnetic media to this 180GB SSD. I'm glad I did, and as a nice bonus I also got a very fresh full system backup (my old hard drive). quickly. How fast depends on many factors, too many to list here, but it's very important that it depends on what speed test tool you're using and what block size you're testing with. Using DskSpeed, linear read speeds with 128 KB blocks typical of most data reached 315 MB/s for linear reads and 279 MB/s for random reads. That's almost 5x the speed of the drive it replaces, and the performance certainly bears that out.* The drive is very small - its 2.5-inch form factor fits into modern laptops* Intel generously offers models of 2 .5 to 3.5 inches. Hard drive adapter bracket to fit neatly in the cage *Intel generously includes mounting hardware (both screws are the right size) and a SATA III 6Gb/s cable *It comes with a quick guide that seems overly simple but actually *is *so simple* The drive is silent, there are no moving parts* It's very light; A comparable magnetic drive in the 2.5-inch form factor weighs about 5 ounces, while this one weighs less than 80 grams (3 ounces). ) * The power consumption is lower than that of a magnetic disk. Windows Benefits: * Boot speed (where the operating system boots, with no BIOS screens) has been reduced from 25 to 4 seconds. * Most applications launch almost instantaneously. For Office apps, browser, and email, it's in the half-second range, where a quick glance away means you've missed it. "permanently stuck at 5.9" lull to 7.9 *Intel Optimization Software You Should Really Use does a great job of quickly tweaking Windows settings to get the best use of the drive and have the least impact on it over the long term* Intel OEM - Acronis version makes migration very easy*. (See why I added the asterisk below. It's a strange case, but some users should be aware of it.) Acronis worked exactly as I hoped. It uses a wizard-like interface to tell the migrating user which drive to clone (e.g. old, slow) and where to create a new clone (e.g. new, super-fast). You can use the wizard step by step and also change what you have already answered by simply clicking on the story statuses on the left side of the application. It starts up a short chunk of Windows to gather your information, then reboots, completes the migration, and that's it. It tells you that your system will shut down when you press a key, then it's time to eject the old drive, make sure the new one is set as the boot drive in the BIOS, and then you're off to the races. Cons: None* (See "Other Thoughts" for a specific case that doesn't affect most users and therefore shouldn't be considered a scam.) Other Thoughts: For most users, this is the end. This is a great solution for slow drives. This does not exempt you from good maintenance practices, cleaning the registry, deleting unnecessary services and everything else if you are an advanced user. This speeds up boot times tremendously (3x faster than the fastest magnetic disk I own in my testing and about 5x faster than the one it replaced) and based on MTBF it should be a permanent solution. in the ointment for it and it's not the drive itself. This is an Acronis program. As mentioned above, this is the perfect solution for most users and worked great for me after solving an unexpected issue I couldn't work around. I am giving no stars for this as I am very grateful for how easy everything went once I manually removed the lag. See below for this special case. This was a problem for me: I had a Linux partition at the end of my boot drive that I put there with my BIOS. It served as a system state backup 24 months ago. I didn't delete them because I expected to be able to tell Acronis just the Windows partition to clone it. Not so; He wanted to either 1) move the entire drive as is, which would split the partition in half, or 2) move the entire drive and shrink the partitions proportionately, or 3) let me put it this way. So I chose the manual method (#3) hoping that I could use it to select only the Windows partition. It's not like this; Instead, he wanted to move both the Windows partition and the Linux partition, which I didn't want. It offered no way out. So I had to exit the application, run diskpart and delete the Linux partition (because Disk Management can't do that). If you find yourself in this situation, you should also use the "Override" switch to remove the partition after selecting the drive and partition first. This isn't the place for a tutorial, but I wanted to draw the attention of some users who are migrating an existing partition that is one of at least two partitions on a drive, at least one of the others is a Linux or other OEM partition is .