That’s not a hard drive!

In the immortal words of Jean Luc Picard, “Engage!”.  That’s the feeling I get with the nice new drive in my shiny new laptop.  Of course it may have something to do with playing Star Trek Online in 1920x1200 at 40+ fps too.  :)

I’d ordered my Alienware M17x with a 128GB SSD, and only after I received it did I decide that wasn’t big enough.  So I ordered a 256GB Crucial RealSSD C300, and I was about to write a note about how happy I am with it and then I see this.  For the money I just paid for this thing Crucial better come out with a firmware fix or offer free replacement drives!  EDIT: They did, though it wipes your data so you better have a spare drive and imaging software.  Get it here.

For the record though here is a benchmark comparison between my new drive in the Alienware M17x [Intel i7 720QM | 4GB DDR3 1333 MHz | 1920x1200 RGB LED | Dual 1GB ATI 4870 | 256GB Crucial Real SSD C300 | 128GB SSD | Intel Ultimate N 6300] and my Intel SATA RAID 0 (240GB x 2) array in my desktop.  OK it’s using slightly different versions of the benchmark but you get the idea.   :)

Old and beefy:

New and shiny:

For small files there is just no comparison in speed.  Even for large files this thing flies in comparison.

So hopefully I don’t encounter the problem Anand has reported any time soon, because for now anyway, I am loving the new found speed both for work and for gaming.