QuickTest: SSD for MacBook
A few days ago about 6 months ago I got an Solid State Drive to replace the standard 250GB 5400rpm one which came in my MacBook. The SSD is 64GB from Crucial, they claim upto 200MB/s read speed
Here are some performance disk test charts from xbench:
The red bars are the new SSD and the blue is the old stock MacBook drive.
After using this drive all I can say is WOW.
Seriously, this thing is fast!
For example, we all know iTunes, a large app which usually takes around 10-30 seconds to fully open with all your cover-flow images loaded into ram ready to scroll around.
Now, straight after booting with this SSD, I can click iTunes and it boucnes in the dock 2 times and its all loaded!
Same story with masses of thumbnails when opening iPhoto…
And its silent! When the macbook fan is less than 1500rpm you cant hear anything! If you put your ear on the keyboard you can hear the processor whine but apart from that its ultra silent. And doesn’t get hot, which is nice.
Soo fast!
An SSD will improve your mac performance a lot more than the usual ram upgrade. I would definitely recommend this to any mac user who can afford to have less space.
Massive improvement in boot time, application load times, copying files. Almost everything really.
I would have happily paid more than I did (£115) for the drive. One of the best things I’ve ever bought!
BTW, I’m using a black MacBook from 2008: 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, with 4GB RAM from crucial.com
