Part of my routine is skimming though web content on Bloglines including dealmac.com’s storage deals. While on vacation I saw the 64GB Crucial RealSSD and finally bit. I ordered it from Crucial along with a 2GB RAM module intent on speeding up our 2008 Intel MacBook.
Well the hardware was waiting for us when we got home: I swapped out the 120GB SATA drive for the SSD and replaced the two 512MB RAM modules with the 2GB. The Time Machine/Time Capsule combination made the restore very easy using the Mac OS 10.6 install DVD. It took several hours (overnight) but we had our old MacBook back… or did we?
Actually it looks the same but is quite different. Wake from sleep used to take a noticeably long time as did closing some programs (like Entourage). Everything now is lickety split fast. Also battery life seems longer although it is just perception.
I’ve read that over time the SSDs tend to slow down a little but the model I got – spec wise – is so much quicker than our laptop can seem to handle I hope we don’t even notice it. [read speeds of 265MB/sec vs. around 100MB/sec for the drive it replaced] Yes we lost a little HD space but other than an occasional job for Handbrake we don’t create much data on the lappy.
Opinion: more RAM and SSDs are good things.
UPDATE: the additional SSD I had ordered to put into the G5 PowerMac was a flop – I couldn’t get it to recognize the drive… I had been very interested to see what speed increase we’d see using the SSD as a boot drive and leaving our massive iTunes library on the existing rotating platter. Oh well.