Let’s call it a day. I’m now running my new Intel X25-M SSD for a little bit more than a day, but more importantly one working day. Shortly, I’m pleased.
I don’t know, maybe my expectations yesterday were too high or maybe I wasn’t just observing (or had no time) the useful stuff. And as correctly this morning my friend Petr Kaleta pointed, I’m not only comparing the disk itself, but also the rest of the system (Dell Latitude D620), whether it’s able to keep up with the disk.
Anyway new observation from today is seeking. Simply forgot about it. First you not hear it – no moving heads, no sound. So somewhere in background you feel something is different. And other fact is that the “seeking” is so fast, you’ll waste other time checking email etc. My Opera, right now with 30 tabs, starts with same speed as empty Chromium was doing on old disk. And it’s not only about the start, when you see the application it’s ready to work with. The post-start processes are already done. Same with Outlook. It behaves really instantly when switching folders, searching, checking calendar etc.
Other piece I noticed is working with virtual machines. You know, I run all my development environment in VMs, hence I stress it a lot. The start up is roughly two times faster as I wrote yesterday. The suspend is even faster. But when you suspend one and start another it’s significant. Normally I was waiting a long time, the disk was overloaded. Now, it doesn’t matter. Same speed.
Another chapter is working inside the VM. The applications there are working faster, thanks to the good seeking behavior. The Visual Studio 2010 RC there starts in under 10 seconds (loading solution with one DAL and BL library and one console application). The first compilation is about four times faster, subsequent ones are not such a big improvement as good piece of work is CPU bound. I like this improvement a lot.
The battery life seems to be about 50% better. It depends very on what you’re doing (and in what shape your battery is), and I even don’t remember exactly how quickly was my battery discharging before. So it’s based on my estimate how many tasks I was able to solve before need to recharge. 
Bear with me.
Last stuff I was carefully observing was installation of Opera 10.50, which came out today. After 15-20 seconds the installation was done. The progress bar flew couple times from left to right. I put this down again to great seeking times (the installation pack is around 10MB, no huge data).
The rest of work is more pleasant. It’s not lightning fast (as I expected for the first time – I know it’s not RAM, beat me ), but your not waiting for the disk too much. And maybe it’s just me, but I feel more relaxed when the machine waits for me not vice versa. 
If you have any questions or you want me to test something, let me know, I’ll try my best. Oh, for true geeks, I’m running SSDSA2M160G2GC (model code) or SSDSA2MH160G2XX (product code) Intel X25-M 34nm SATA SSD.
As I recently switched from Virtual PC to VMWare Workstation I wanted to upgrade my VMs to be able to use all cores I have and I granted. Machines I’m using most are Windows XPs and Windows 7. As the Windows 7 migration failed and I’m still about to install fresh W7 RTM, the challenge was XP.
Couple of hints I found on internet and as replies to my question in mailing list but nothing was working or it was screwing the system. But then I found a great document, with the manual, forced, way of switching. Although the document recommends doing the surgery in safe mode, I did it in live system (vivat snapshots) once, with just raw copy (+overwrite) and it worked.
copy C:WindowsServicePackFilesi386halmacpi.dll C:Windowssystem32HAL.DLL
copy C:WindowsServicePackFilesi386ntkrnlmp.exe C:Windowssystem32ntoskrnl.exe
copy C:WindowsServicePackFilesi386ntkrpamp.exe C:Windowssystem32ntkrnlpa.exe
Anyway, on real important system I would recommend safe mode too. After reboot the system detected new hardware, installed it and after another reboot I was ready to make the cores screaming.
I recently migrated from VPC to VMWare Workstation. So far all looks good only one problem I faced two days ago. When I run Visual Studio 2010 (Beta 2), the menu rendering was odd, text in code editor was disappearing and so on. After some searching I found, that it may be caused by 3D graphics acceleration turned on in VMWare Workstation. Surprisingly you have to turn it off – either in system, setting DisableHWAcceleration in registry (it’s for WPF) or unchecking the 3D acceleration in VM’s settings. After this adjustment (my choice was the VM level, as it may be improved later and it’s IMO easier to turn it on), all works great. I hope when the RTM of Visual Studio 2010 will be released, this will work as expected.
I’ve been using Virtual PC (2007) for a quite while and very heavily. In fact my entire development environment is in VMs. But I was getting more and more upset with Virtual PC. The version 2007 SP1 is/was kind of old, missing some new features and improvements. When testing the new Windows Virtual PC I felt like it’s focused more on standard users and mainly to run some XP applications in Windows 7, not as a full size virtualization tool for advanced users (but I may be wrong, it’s just feeling).
So I tested the VMWare Workstation 7, couple of days ago. Shortly, I’m sold. It’s much more mature (again my feeling), has really advanced features for geeks as me (like the snapshots – I created my own way with Virtual PC, but in VMWare Workstation it’s much easier) and the Unity – I like it (I know Windows Virtual PC has this too, but VMWare Workstation seems to support more systems).
The migration was the only challenge. All my VMs in Virtual PC contained software and setups that I didn’t want to reinstall from scratch. I’m running some XP boxes, where the migration was OK. I was just forced to do the activation again, but no problem. The Windows 7 (this instance was RC) it ended in BSOD. System suggested me some repair utility during next boot, but it didn’t help. So the W7 system will be probably reinstalled, which isn’t so bad, because I was planning to install the RTM, just little depressing. The Linux boxes, based mainly on some Live CDs, ran without problems. So the overall result is good, I think.
From the performance perspective, I can’t judge the performance of VM itself. I was more or less happy with Virtual PC and I don’t have some exact numbers to provide. But what’s faster is saving and restoring the state of the machine and I’m using this a lot.
I hope I’ll not find some critical problem that will make me hate the VMWare.
