This weekend I upgraded to a new shiny SSD to go in my new build. The benefits of SSD drives are apparent as several popular bloggers are upgrading to them. (namely Scott Hanselman, Jeff Atwood, and Joel Spolsky)  The Crucial 128GB drive struck my fancy as it is the first drive that has a reasonable capacity and won’t break the pocket book. I thought I’d quickly post my Windows Experience Index as indicated by Windows 7 RC:

Here are my scores with my Maxtor 7200 RPM 160GB drive:

BeforeNewDrive_Score

And here are my scores with the new Crucial 128GB SSD:

AfterNewDrive

The most noticeable improvement in performance I’ve seen is at boot time, just after logging in. It honestly seems now that the motherboard’s POST screens take longer to load and process than the initial splash screen and loading time of Windows 7. So far, I am very happy with the new drive and will be pushing for an SSD upgrade for my work machine.