Is it worth putting a Solid State Drive into my Macbook Pro?

Published December 30, 2010

<spoiler>Yes.</spoiler>

Ten points for guessing what I got for Christmas.

There are two good reasons not to do this.

  1. Per GB of storage, they're frigging expensive.
  2. They don't even make particularly big ones yet, so if you need a lot of storage and you're made of money - you're still stuffed.

Here is a complete list of reasons that you should.

  1. They're f-cking fast. Like really fast.
  2. So f-cking fast, that I'm putting it down twice.

Most people will give you a write up about how awesome they are, how to install them etc. A cursory google search is your friend here - I'm not. Suffice to say that even without TRIM support on the Mac, the OCZ Vertex 2E is great.

Seriously great. I love it. This laptop is over 2 years old now, and it feels brand new. If you can deal with the space constraints, and an external portable HDD should help with that, then you will have zero regrets. In fact, once you've had SSD fast you can (probably) never go back.

iTunes is fast, and pleasant to use - not had a beach ball yet, even with an iPhone plugged in. My iPhoto library is 12GB big, and is now instantaneous.

Holy feck people, the revolution is here.

(p.s. and for you status monkeys, here's my already fast 7200rpm Western Digital Caviar Black vs. my Time Machine restored 1 week old SSD)

Western Digital Caviar Black

Results 42.78   
System Info     
    Xbench Version      1.3
    System Version      10.6.5 (10H574)
    Physical RAM        4096 MB
    Model       MacBookPro5,1
    Drive Type      WDC WD3200BEKT-00F3T0
Disk Test   42.78   
    Sequential  74.21   
        Uncached Write  78.48   48.18 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Write  92.37   52.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Uncached Read   52.33   15.31 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Read   89.13   44.80 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Random  30.05   
        Uncached Write  10.73   1.14 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Write  114.71  36.72 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Uncached Read   50.37   0.36 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Read   87.75   16.28 MB/sec [256K blocks]

OCZ Vertex 2E 120GB

Results 300.38  
System Info     
    Xbench Version      1.3
    System Version      10.6.5 (10H574)
    Physical RAM        4096 MB
    Model       MacBookPro5,1
    Drive Type      OCZ-VERTEX2
Disk Test   300.38  
    Sequential  179.84  
        Uncached Write  253.70  155.77 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Write  259.22  146.67 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Uncached Read   85.55   25.04 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Read   363.08  182.48 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Random  911.14  
        Uncached Write  1305.36 138.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Write  456.34  146.09 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Uncached Read   2459.83 17.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Read   974.48  180.82 MB/sec [256K blocks]