I just installed a 120GB OCZ Agility Series Solid-State Drive. Once I had Windows up and running on the drive, I installed Sibelius 5.2.5 and VDL 2.5.1. I did a quick before and after test. The ";before"; configuration was two 36GB 10,000 RPM Raptor hard drives with Sibelius, and the Essentials and VDL libraries on my server, which runs a RAID 1 array with two 750GB 7,200 RPM drives. The ";after"; has everything on the SSD.

Sibelius actually takes longer to start with the SSD:
Before - 44.7s
After - 57.1

But then I loaded up a full score of part of last season's high school marching band show.
Before: 1min 50.1s
After: 31.4s

That is a 323% improvement in score loading time, and obviously it's very noticeable. This drive cost about $370 after mail-in rebate, but you can get 64GB drives for well under $300. I'm still moving my installed programs to the SSD, and when that's done the entire operation of the computer should be noticeably faster.

Cool - thanks for the report, Joe.  I'm definitely wanting to give SSD the old college try, but want to wait until they're a bit less per GB, though it might be a while since people are still pretty slow to adopt them.  Most people stick to the policy of getting more space per dollar and don't seem to pay much attention to read/write speeds.

Enjoy your new speed demon of a machine :-)

Joe - I appreciate you taking the time to document and share your results. Sounds like very promising performance improvements with the SSD. I'm certain this is the future of where things are headed, so it's good to know things are working well for you.

Thanks again!