HI Guys/Grils,
Sorry but this going to be a lenghy review as I think this SSD justifies it.
Last week one of raptor drives I had in a RAID0 array popped and it was finally time for me to upgrade to an SSD. I ordered this drive on Friday 3/12 and in the mean time done a fresh install of Win7 64bit Ultimate onto a normal 7200rpm hdd. I timed this drive at booting up in 1 minute and 3 secs including POST (windows boots in about 43 seconds).
This SSD arrived on Thursday 9/12 which I was more than happy with, I installed this SSD as my main boot drive, then set my BIOS into AHCI mode and installed Win7 64bit onto it.
First things first, installing Win7 was straight forward and quick, I had completed the install in about 20 minutes. I then installed the main apps that I use on a daily basis (Microsoft Security Essentials AV, Firefox, SabNZB, Winrar, UTorrent, WinAmp). I then timed the bootup again and this time a complete boot up including POST took 1min 4 secs lol. I benchmarked the drive using ATTO Disk Benchmark and was getting write speeds of around 245mb/s and read speeds around 275 mb/s, so I realised the problem wasnt with the SSD. With a bit of investigation I discovered the problem was with Win7 drivers that were automatically installed for my motherboard chipset. I downloaded the latest drivers and installed them and then timed the bootup again, this time the machine completed boot including POST in 36 secs, Win7 booted in 16 seconds.
I am well impressed with this drive as most things I do now are snappier and quicker.
The size of this drive is not an issue at the sec as even with CoD Black Ops installed, I still have 26 gb free, and after xmas I will be purchasing a 2nd of these drives to put into a RAID0 array, which should give me around 110 gb in total, which is ample for my needs.
I highly reccomend this SSD and was more than happy with the service I received from AVIDES.
I will update this mini review again after I have had this for a month or so to show if there was any degradation in performance.