[Tips] Benefits of SSD — servoy magazine

Picked up the latest "force series" Corsair 120GB SSD from Newegg the other day and installed in my 13" Macbook Pro last night. Unlike Newegg delivery (basically next day), I had to wait 11 days for a 500GB MCE OptiBay drive to arrive. Cool product though — painless swap out of my DVD drive that I never used for an extra hard drive that is very much needed with the smaller capacity SSD as the new startup drive.

My main goal with this switch was to get Servoy startup times reduced. I run with separate Servoy installs for every project I have going and a typical day can have me bouncing between five to ten different Servoy's. With Servoy 3's five second startup times, this was never anything I thought much about.

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Servoy 5's startup times are painful in comparison. More like opening Photoshop than a word processor now. If I had 16GB of RAM, I'd never shut a Servoy instance down.

Times: 500GB SATA Drive

Servoy 1st startup: 45 seconds
repeat startup: 28 seconds

Smart Client 1st startup: 33 seconds
repeat smart client startup: 20 seconds

Times: 120GB SSD

Servoy 1st startup: 25 seconds
Repeat startup: 23 seconds

Smart Client 1st startup: 33 seconds
repeat smart client startup: 18 seconds

Results

Initially, I wasn't blown away with the results. Definitely a nice improvement but I was hoping with all the hard drive activity Servoy generates on startup I would see a 50% reduction in startup times. (And there is virtually no change in Smart Client load times which happens even more often than loading up Servoy.) Apparently there is a lot more going on than just accessing the hard drive when starting up Eclipse.

After a day of use though, less obvious speed gains became apparent. I've kept a hard drive activity monitor open and there are quite a number of tasks in Servoy that hit the hard drive. And all of these tasks seem "smoother" — no interface glitching while waiting for the hard drive to catch up. I'm finding myself naturally clicking through tasks faster as a result and the overall feel is one of increased flow. The aggregate of small speed improvements while working within Servoy is definitely noticeable.

What I wasn't expecting (silly me) was the huge difference an SSD has on other applications. The biggest I've noticed so far are the operating system and the Mail app. Restart of the operating system, 70% faster (whoa). Mail app feels like it's 10x's faster -- it opens and navigates folders almost instantaneously compared to the sluggishness it exhibited before (lots of email).

Summary

The combination of a Servoy's nice speed improvement with some serious speed improvements in other much used applications makes this a solid investment. Highly recommend it if you spend hours in front of your computer.

Cost: $296 for the SSD and $99 for the hard drive tray to go into the optical slot.

Comments (3)

Johan 2010-09-10

SSD is the best upgrade a man (or woman) can do yes. Its the best upgrade that i did in years and years. Only maybe in the Pentium 1 or 2 years i had similar jumps in performance (back then a cpu could really be twice as fast) Eclipse is a bit different beast, when i start eclipse it is not disk bound, my CPU goes to 50% (one core) and that only ends when eclipse is there. So for me eclipse is just cpu constraint at the moment, not disk.

John 2011-04-12

Hi David, What all do you put on your SSD drive versus the standard hard drive? I have a funny deal going with Apple that means I might get a replacement new MacBook Pro but I'm having a hard time getting it with a similar SSD 256. So I'm thinking of doing something similar, i.e. getting a smaller SSD and using that for my startup drive. But what should go on there and what should go on the extra hard drive? Especially of course Servoy-wise.

David Workman 2011-04-13

Operating system and your main Servoy development installs for sure. I basically have everything I use on a daily basis on the SSD and use the other drive for music, videos, unused apps, etc. It works if you're on a budget.