Maybe you've seen the YouTube video where a flame-haired, SSD-enthusiast assembles 24 solid state drives into a RAID array to create the dreamiest PC we've ever seen (if not, we embedded it below). As the techie viral clip makes enviously clear, adding an SSD to your notebook brings with it faster read/seek times, quicker app opens, and speedier overall performance. Though a 128GB SSD won't help you open 52 applications in 19 seconds like our hero in the video, we discovered in our High-Speed Solid State Roundup that installing an SSD absolutely makes for a computing experience with less waiting and more doing. We used a customized notebook to perform a number of tests on these drives, including measuring the time it takes to copy, zip and unzip files and the length of time for the computer to complete booting. During our application open test, the OCZ Summit Series--one of the seven SSDs we tested--started Photoshop in 9 seconds. That doesn't sound like much until you learn that the 7,200-rpm spinning hard drive we used as a control took over 20 seconds to open the same application. When we turned on the pressure by opening Photoshop while simultaneously zipping a group of media files totaling 4.97GB, the 7200-rpm drive took an eternal 2 minutes to launch the application. The OCZ Summit Series SSD opened the application in a flashier 20.6 seconds. Four of the other drives opened Photoshop even faster. To find out which of the SSDs tested performed the best overall, read our roundup. And to see the magical effect 24 SSDs had on one PC, watch this video.
