OCZ SSD Flash Drive on my Thinkpad

So I took the plunge and decided to get an OCZ SSD Flash Drive from ZipZoomFly.com. After everything was said and done it turned out to cost me just about $111.00 after rebate and shipping for a 60GB drive, not bad. Let me give you a little background about what i put it on first. Here are the specs to my X61 Tablet Thinkpad.

1.  Intel Core 2 Duo L7500 1.6Ghz Low Voltage Processor
2. 2 GB Ram
3. 2 GB Rombus Memory
4. GMA X3100 graphics
5. The crappiest speakers ever

Another interesting note, I upgraded my OS from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate. The results are based on Sandra testing my 120GB 7200 drive scored a 28 m/bit transfer rate. The new SSD drive came in at around 109 m/bit, a huge performance bump. Windows experience score with 7200rpm drive was 3.4, while the experience score for new drive came in at 6.2. Lastly the benchmark we can all appreciate, Visual Studio 2008 (Minus SQL Server  2005 setup and C++) installed in 45 minutes on the 7200, the SSD it installed in 11 minutes!

Overall I am pretty happy with the purchase, I had to do a series of things first to fix stuttering issues I was having with the drive. The OCZ forum helped out a lot, I believe it is due to an issue that they are having with a JMicron controller that they are using. Essentially the problem is that it can't handle too many writes all at the same time. With platter based hard drives, you may not realize this, but a lot had to go into them to make them go faster. If you think about disk defragmentation, page files, caching, superfech, prefetch, and all the rest, they are all geared towards helping your spinning disk drive give you information faster. None of this stuff is needed for an SSD drive and therefore actually slows its performance down. If you are interested this is a great link I used to do all the upgrades.

OCZ Forum Tips for Speeding up SSD Drive

I am going to use this drive to do some hard core Visual Studio 2008 work and will report back my results at a later time. BTW I hate the new Windows 7 interface, maybe i am vista old shool but making the toolbar transparent is kind of annoying. Actually I wish they kept with their whole black toolbar, darth vader look. Oh well...