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(More customer reviews)I decided to get the PNY SSD for my desktop tower and was pleasantly surprised with it's performance. At $225 the PNY was cheaper than other 128GB drives. Back around the 7th of July, 2010 there weren't any reviews or people even talking about it which made it hard to know what to expect. However, because the specs looked really good, I figured why not give it a try. The first thing I did when I got my drive was to copy my Windows 7 HD partition to it using acronis. There are of course many other ways to do this, or a clean install is also good. Right off the bat I noticed that Windows 7 seemed to load in less than 1/2 the time! Originally my i7 based pc would boot from a western digital HD in about 22 seconds. But now it was like 10 to 11!! The very next thing I did was to run Crystal Disk Mark 2.2 and got a sequential read speed of 244 MB/sec! and write speed of 156 MB/sec which is way better than my HD. The 512K result got 186 for read and 147 for write. The 4K was 20.04 read and 23.46 write. It gets everything PNY was advertising. Also when I got the drive, the box has upgraded numbers that put the write speed at 150 and not 130 like Amazon describes. Sometimes it got up to 248MB/sec read and 167MB/sec write as numbers can change on subsequent tests. But all benches were in that rough range of figures. It's write speed is also quite a bit faster than Intel X-25 series drive as they only seem to get about 80 MB/sec on sequential writes.
Next I loaded some favorite applications and they came up much faster. Games, browsers, video editors, studio applications etc all loaded notably faster. What I'm finding out is that the PNY is actually one of the faster SSD's on the market in it's price range, or perhaps even $75-$100 more. Of course there are faster drives out there, but I've found that many that are around double the price aren't usually that much faster. Of course there are a few ultra high end drives that are even better, but I didn't set out to buy the most expensive drive. Given that the write performance is faster than a lot of comparably priced drives out there, and maybe almost twice as fast as the Intel X25M I kind of disagree with another review here that says this is the "5400 rpm drive" of SSD's. It kind of gives the impression the PNY is like the slow, economy, version of SSD's which isn't true. I agree it's not top end, but this PNY is no slouch. In fact it may just be the best bang for the buck, in the SSD market right now.
Because I "image" my HD backups I was also able to test XP. From the point it first says loading windows, I got to he desktop in 9 seconds most times, but a couple of times it was like 10 which is roughly what win 7 got. That of course could vary with the installation and depends on what kind of hardware a person has. But I'd think any one could get a boost over HD performance with this, give or take.. I also didn't have to fool around with AHCI or any other settings. I just connected it and it acted like like a regular HD. Of course that could be different on other BIOS's and motherboards, but it did work out easily for me. Plus the drive also includes TRIM. Another nice touch is they managed to fit a mini USB connector on the back of this very thin drive. Normally I'd use the SSD for a system drive, but I hooked up a USB cable and found it acts just like a giant USB flash drive. I could then walk up to any pc with USB ports and copy files with no problems. The strange thing is that PNY doesn't seem to do a very good job of advertising their drive at all. You would never know it's a good drive by visiting their site for example which is unfortunate. And few people are talking about it. That said, I give this 5 stars for being a good price per GB and faster than I expected.
Click Here to see more reviews about: PNY 128 GB Optima SSD SATA II 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) P-SSD2S128GM-CT01RB
The PNY Optima Solid State Drive is the latest offering in a suite of PNY products that factor in improving the experience in and around your personal computer. The Optima SSD is the latest in storage technology over traditional notebook hard drives, offering improved operations across your entire system in terms of superior performance, faster application loading, longer battery life and greater shock resistance. Unlike hard drives, PNY's Optima SSD has no moving parts and is comprised of MLC Flash which offers the right mix of performance and durability with 240MB/sec read and 130MB/s write speeds that easily outperform the fastest hard drives. Also featured on the drives, is 64MB of onboard cache – a DRAM buffer that ensures the SSD performs at its best by reducing the possibility of bottlenecks within data transfers. Optima\'s SSDs are TRIM enabled, providing a safeguard from performance degradation – allowing the drive to stay closer to its peak performance over time. The SSD has a 2.5-inch form factor and features a SATA II interface which is backwards compatible with SATA allowing it to be an easy drop-in replacement for your notebook hard drive. The drives are compatible with Windows 7, Vista, and XP as well as Linux and Mac OS X and later.
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