A fine laptop in its time and still good today with the mods we’ve done on it over the time. For an example of this, we dug through some of our old equipment and pulled out a 2009 Gateway FX laptop. However, I pointed out at the start of the story that it also depends on your system and what it supports. This drive performs quite well, on the level of something like the Seagate 600 SSD, which has been one of our favorites in the past). We saw slightly better numbers when installed internally or using an external Thunderbolt 2.0 (and 3.0–similar to USB 3.1 type-C, but faster) solution. Our average low for transferring larger numbers of files all at once fell around 128MB/s (same method).
Our average speed was around 175-182MB/s transferring single large files to the drive. Some of the slowest write speeds we saw with this drive came from when we used the drive in an external dock via USB 3.0. This can sometimes happen as there always seems to be a small margin of error between the true 1024b/kb/mb/gb/tb math and what you really get in the end (although 35GB can be a bit high).
There seems to be around 35GB+ of space unaccounted for. It was a bit less than we were expecting (we were shooting for around 930GB based on our math). Not a game-changer per se, but seems to be the average expectation for an SSD. We came to a final conclusion that we were seeing around 15-25% faster speeds when opening files and applications. It was harder to figure out application launch speeds since operating systems cache so well now when it comes to frequently opened items. Boot time was decreased to around 8-10 seconds, depending on how fast we could enter the password.
With the OWC SSD, we felt rushed to enter the login password because we felt like the slow variable holding it back. With the HDD, our average boot time into Windows was around 18-22 seconds, including pre-OS, login, and a finished desktop load (including the few apps running in the background). Keep in mind, this is a freshly built system, thus it already had a pretty quick boot to it. The initial boot times were drastically different. The original hard drive is a Seagate 2TB internal HDD. We took a recently built i7 test system with minimal RAM installed and no external graphics card (yet), and quickly cloned the C drive to the SSD so that we could compare the performance between the two.
We took some time out to test one of OWC’s Mercury Pro 6G SSDs (1TB in size) to see what it can accomplish. Of course, it all depends on the system you are working with, and what it supports when it comes to SATA or PCIe traffic. Not only that, but they require about 50% or less power, produce less heat, and have the potential of lasting a long time due to the lack of moving parts. With an SSD, you simply replace a single HDD and you can typically find 2-5 times the performance you had before. There are a lot of things you can do to a computer to speed things up with, but very few that have such an effect, without spending hundreds of dollars and buying multiple products. There is nothing like installing the right solid-state drive into your system when it comes to price vs performance.