This page covers my experience with the OCZ Vertex solid state drive.

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This solid state drive was a gift from a few wonderful college friends. It is probably the best upgrade you can make to your computer, in terms of affecting your day to day work.

Just as a comparison, Windows Vista goes from power on to post-login in 15 seconds, and Photoshop CS4 loads in 3 seconds. Microsoft Word 2007 loads in 2 seconds.

Because the drive is only 30GB, I installed the OS and most used programs on the drive. All documents, pictures, and other space-hogging files are put on my Samsung hard drive.

Here is a great overview of how solid state drives work from Anandtech, another excellent hardware site. A review of the OCZ Vertex starts at page 20 or so.

Here are some HDTach benchmarks of the Vertex and Samsung Ecogreen drives. Pay attention to these things:

• Solid state drives really shine on random access times. This is the time it takes the drive to access any specific part of the drive. The OCZ Vertex has 0.1ms, the mechanical hard drive at 18.3ms. This is an improvement of over two orders of magnitude.
• Sequential read speed read speed is higher on this as well. You can notice the read speed on the Samsung drive decreasing as the drive accesses further out regions of the drive. In contrast, the Vertex is fairly consistent throughout the drive.
• I didn't measure write speeds, but they are also high. See more at the Anandtech article.