Early Christmas in..December.

UPS guy played Santa today and dropped off some new toys.

That's a Samsung SSD, a Zotac mini-itx motherboard, and a Rosewill CPU cooler. The important one is this:

That's a Samsung 470 Series 64GB SSD. I recall mentioning that I wanted to get one recently (2 days ago?). So I ordered it Monday (yesterday) at 10am. Newegg had a sale, and I snagged it for right under a hundred bones.

I was so excited when I got it in today at lunch that I had to install it. Had Win 7 Pro up and running in half an hour. Got everything tweaked and started testing this bitch.

Quick verdict? It's fast. Surprised?

For reference, last night I ran HD Tune on the stock Toshiba 5400RPM 250GB drive, and the average transfer rate was 79.9MB/sec.

Then I re-ran CrystalMark 2004R3:

Check that HDD score, shit is off the scale! My total CM2004 score went up by ~22,000 because of it.

Now though, back to reality. How does it feel? Well it boots up to Windows + Chrome open in 23 seconds, compared to nearly 50 seconds before. The palm rest is now cool to the touch instead of slow cooking my wrist. The most noticeable thing so far is just how reactive everything is. There literally is no waiting for things, it just happens as you release the mouse button.

Granted, if you don't mind the 4 seconds some things take to open, then a pricey SSD may not suit you. I bought this one because the rated power draw is incredibly small and I'm hoping to do some battery tests. A hundred bucks for 64GB seems a tad steep, but the 128GB one is still hovering around $300 so I figured this was a more responsible way to dive into SSDing. Speaking of 64GB, I was a tad worried about space. I'm not anymore:

This isn't a laptop I'll be storing my entire music or video collection on anytime soon, but I never did that anyway. I've got a 500GB external drive for all of that nonsense and a 750GB server hosting even more.

Now that I've got my feet in the water though, I'm already looking to cannonball. Two of these in a RAID0 on my desktop? Yes, please.

As for the other things the UPS guy left me. There's a Zotac NF610I-K-E motherboard. A socket 775 mini-itx motherboard with onboard Geforce 7050 graphics. Also theres a Rosewill RCX-Z775-LP CPU cooler. That's a low profile socket 775 cooler with an 80mm fan. What's all this for? A new project I've started. Here's a preview:

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