MSI Wind SSD swap-out shows no performance increase

Back when MSI first announced their Wind budget ultraportable, one of the snarkier parts of the press release was their justification for using a traditional hard-drive rather than flash or SSD storage.  MSI described rivals as having “compromised the memory capacity to decrease [their notebooks] in size”, picking instead a 2.5-inch 80GB HDD.  Since then the company has also suggested that SSDs may not, in fact, offer quite the performance increase they’re credited with; LaptopMag decided to swap out their Wind’s drive for a SanDisk SSD to see how true that is.

MSI fit the Wind with a relatively high-spec 5,400rpm Western Digital Scorpio drive; in its place, LaptopMag’s Avram Piltch slotted a 32GB SanDisk SATA 5000.  Avram does admit that the SSD isn’t exactly known for its blistering performance, but the actual results - once Windows XP and all suitable drivers were re-loaded - were surprising.

Boot time, pretty important for these ultraportables, didn’t change - taking 32-34 seconds - and programs failed to load faster.  General observations of battery life suggested no change there, either.  Avram’s conclusion is that MSI did Wind owners no disservice, at least in terms of speed or battery, by picking a standard drive (though obviously it’s more easily damaged by drops or shaking).  Perhaps with a super-fast SSD the performance increase would be there, but such drives are in some cases currently commanding more than the Wind itself would cost.