How about an 32GB SSD SATA boot drive?

[Birk Binnard]

Does anyone have experience using a solid state disk as Vista boot
drive? From what I've been reading an SATA SSD boots much faster than
the fastest spinning disk and is clearly much more reliable. The 32GB
SSD's are not that expensive now and I'm thinking a system with an SSD
boot drive and reasonably fast hard drive for swap, temp, logs, etc.
might be a stellar performer.

There are some caveats with SSD's though: they have slow write speeds so
you need to disable/relocate as much write activity as possible. Also,
SSD's have a finite number of write cycles they can perform, but with
moving most of the write activity to a HD their lifetime seems to exceed
even the best mechanical drive.

 

[Curious]

My Vista HP 32 bit SP1 system boots and starts downloading my e-mail in
about 45 seconds with a SATA HDD. I have superfetch enabled and it takes
another minute or so go get all my services running. My Outlook E-mal
program is in my start group so it comes up first.

 

[DL]

Theres more to just the boot disk with regard perforance, its also dependent
on other hardware and the programs used
And then you mention 'reasonably fast hd', allready you are degrading any
performance

 

[Gary Mount]

I imagine that by the time you wore out a 32GB SSD drive because of the
limited lifetime number of write cycles, a replacement would be very cheap.
For an example, my 16 MB flash card can be replaced with a new 2,000 MB card
for about 1/3 of what I paid originally.

 

[Curious]

I might also mention that my Wireless Laptop with Windows 7 Beta finishes
the boot process the including all services and connects to my IE8 home page
in less then 50 seconds.

My Vista HP 32 bit SP1 system boots and starts downloading my e-mail in
about 45 seconds with a SATA HDD. I have superfetch enabled and it takes
another minute or so go get all my services running. My Outlook E-mal
program is in my start group so it comes up first.