A Solid State Hard Drive for My MacBook Pro

It seems that Tim's beaten me to the SSD punch, but I thought I'd post a few impressions of life with a SSD-equipped MacBook Pro.

Initially I was pretty worried about compatibility with my MacBookPro5,5 since SSDs weren't really around back in 2009 when my model debuted, and in perusing the OCZ forums it sounded like a fair number of folks were having trouble with the SandForce-based drives in the earlier MacBook Pros. So even though I could have bought an OCZ model for a little less, after talking with the folks at OWC and being assured that their drives weren't having any problems in my specific model MacBook, I went with a Mercury Extreme Pro 3G.

I'm happy to report that I haven't had a lick of trouble with the new drive. I did a fresh install of Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.8) and was fairly choosey about which apps to migrate over, as the SSD drive is 80GB smaller than my old Western Digital Scorpio Black--which itself was an upgrade over the original hard drive.

Why'd I feel the need to upgrade? Well, my Mac's two years old now and even when I bought it it wasn't at the leading edge of Intel's processor offerings. So relative to newer hardware it's getting pretty slow. Also, I use a Windows 7 VM for work, meaning my laptop is running two OSes at the same time, almost all the time. That takes up lots more CPU, RAM and hard disk space than normal. The upgrade to the Scorpio Black certainly helped performance, but recently it was beginning to feel poky on occasion and I was getting more spinning beach balls than I liked. I don't think the frequency of the beach balls was increasing; I was probably just becoming less patient.

After having used the SSD for a couple of weeks, here are my observations:

1. Yes, the laptop boots faster. Lots faster. But, I rarely shut down my laptop and have to wait for a reboot, so this wasn't a big win for me.
2. Mac apps launch much faster. Yea! I rarely get more than one icon bounce in the dock before an app has fully loaded. Again, though, I don't quit and re-launch apps very frequently so this wasn't a huge win for me.
3. My Mac is much more responsive. This was a big win, especially with Win7 under Parallels. Windows open and close more quickly, apps launch much faster, etc. Big productivity boost here, as I tend to open and close Windows apps much more frequently.
4. I can close the lid and just stuff the laptop into my bag right away. This was another big win. My Mac used to take a long time to go to sleep after closing its lid, primarily because two OSes were trying to go to sleep at the same time. And, since I didn't want to risk damaging the hard drive by moving the computer while it was still going into sleep mode, that meant that I spent a lot of time waiting for the darn thing to go to sleep. Now, since everything's solid state, I can immediately stuff the laptop in my bag and get going without any concern for the disk.
5. Surprisingly, OS X doesn't use as much RAM. Inactive memory use has dropped dramatically. I'm guessing that OS X's caching routines aren't trying to load as much stuff into RAM since the disk is so fast now, but that's just a wild guess.
6. Also a surprise, my battery life isn't any better. The SSD doesn't generate the (mild) heat that the old hard drive did, and it also doesn't vibrate the way the old drive did, but it does seem to use about the same amount of juice.

In summary, I highly recommend an SSD for anyone with a laptop. Just the increased robustness of the drive mechanism, and the resulting ability to move the laptop at any time without having to wait for it to sleep or shutdown, is a wonderful timesaver. This, coupled with the small but frequent productivity increases coming from better VM performance, provide very tangible benefits. In my case, the relatively small investment in the SSD was a huge cost savings over buying a whole new laptop. I can probably go another year, or maybe even two, on this current hardware so the investment for me was well worth it.