With prices of solid state disks falling continuously and my MacBook Pro somehow feeling slower and slower, I decided to replace the original 320 GB Fujitsu harddisk with a 240 GB SSD drive from Corsair.
About two years ago, I bought my current 17 inch MacBook Pro with 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB RAM and a 320 GB 5400 rpm Fujitsu harddisk drive. I remember it felt very fast at that time, but recently, I felt more and more like waiting for the computer to do what I want. Booting the machine, starting applications, working in general started to feel somehow slow.
May be the iPhone and iPad with their “immediately-ready” effect had a certain influence on this, as I doubt that the system performance could have decreased so significantly. Anyway, I decided to buy this 240 GB Corsair Force SSD drive at a price of CHF 507 (about USD 590), one of my best decisions during the past couple of months.
Opening the MacBook Pro’s case is really simple; remove the 10 Philips screws at the bottom and open the unibody aluminium case. There are two more Philips screws, keeping the drive in place - loosen them slightly so that you can remove the plastic bracket, then unplug the SATA connector and pull out the drive.
There are four small Allen screws, two on each side of the disk drive, that you need to move to the new drive. Plug in the new drive and fix the plastic bracket, then close the case. Boot with the Mac OS X System DVD to install a fresh operating system.
The performance gain is fantastic! While a faster CPU or more RAM may give you a gain of a few percents, may be a few dozens, the SSD drive can easily double or triple the performance in some areas! To measure the performance gain, I’ve installed a clean Mac OS X 10.6 on the old harddisk drive and the new SSD drive and installed all software updates (thus getting 10.6.7). The following video shows the effect on the boot time:
Starting applications and copying files is incredibly fast. The biggest effect for me is the performance of restoring and pausing VMware images. This happens nearly instantaneous, compared to about half a minute before the upgrade, thanks to the 275 MB/second write speed of the drive.
So, before buying a new laptop, consider replacing the harddisk with an SSD drive. For me, at least, the time of conventional harddisk drives has definitively come to an end...