Upgrade to SSD?

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DamienThorn

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 28, 2004
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I currently have a mid 2009 MBP 13" (5,5) with a 500GB 5200RPM drive. I'm looking at getting a OCZ Vertex II Extended SSD, but wanted to know if I'd experience any real performance increases - effectively, is it work the $400 (after tax) price?
 
Note, I do NOT have an SSD in my Mac. I have an SSD in my gaming PC, and have heard from ppl who have installed SSD's in mac Portables. That being said...

I paid about $600 for my Crucial TrueSSD (SATA v3.0) I installed it in a Core i7 system, with Win 7 Ultimate, as the primary drive, (with a 500GB magnetic drive for a few large games I play for nostalga like Command & Conquer.)

It boots super quick, and I rarely have problems with lag in Star Trek Online. (Internet by Wide Open West, 10mbit:1mbit)

Your MPB will probably sleep faster, and will certainly load programs almost as fast as you can click on them. wether it's worth it to you depends on wether you can get by with the smaller capacity, and how valuable your time is.
 
I put an X-25M in my 2.66GHz i7 MBP. Definitely made the system far more responsive. For example, opening iTunes now takes less than one second.

I'd say it was worth it, but then again I do a lot of I/O intensive development and work with VMs.
 
In both my laptop (Vertex II 120GB) and my desktop (C300 64GB) the main difference over a HDD? Even a very fast HDD? Multitasking. Try booting up and opening up a browser window as soon as the desktop appears (which the desktop loading, alone, is much faster on a SSD). Games? Not really worth loading onto the SSD in my opinion, however, that's just me :)
 
I put a 60GB Vertex 2 into my 2.26ghz 13" MBP. It cost me about $115 at the time.

It was ENTIRELY worth it. Boot time is awesome, but I rarely reboot this thing. The main advantages are program launch time and space/expose snappiness. Heavy applications like iTunes used to take a bit to load, now it's nearly instant. If you're like most OSX users though, you keep everything up anyway. For me, it's all about the quickness of spaces and expose. Right now I have 15 windows across 4 spaces, which is a little less than average for me. I flip into spaces and then into expose within spaces with zero lag or stuttering. It's buttery smooth.

It's hard to describe the feeling beyond that. Overall it feels faster and smoother, almost like when you reinstalled XP on an old machine and remembered that it didn't always take forever to load everything.

If you are gun shy about the $400, go for a smaller one and put the mechanical one in an external enclosure. SSDs should get more affordable, so a big one might be a bad investment at this point.
 
So worth it; I put the same drive as ryken into my 13" 2.4 GHz aluminum unibody Macbook, and feel that the speed at which applications and documents load has been superbly enhanced. Would spend the $100 again in a heartbeat.
 
I highly suggest replacing the optical drive with your HDD and use a smaller SSD ~60gb hold all my programs so everything loads ridiculously fast and I redirect my downloads and music to the HDD so that I dont fill up my baby. Works great.
 
Just put an X-25m in my 27" iMac, it's an amazing difference. It's weird because the system is essentially silent and at first I wasn't sure it was even turned on. Loading apps is instantaneous, usually one icon bounce or less. I have my iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto and Aperture libraries on my 2tb WD Caviar Black external drive so it works perfectly.
 
Upgrade to SSD? Yes
Is it worth it? Absolutely

You're going to ask yourself why you waited so long.
 
Yes it is addictive! The speed is insane. I can't wait to slap a Vertex 3 Sata6 drive in my new MBP (the Sandy Bridge MacBook Pros are sata6) that will be insanely good.
 
Well, I ended up getting a Vertex 2 240GB SSD, and I'm incredibly impressed with how snappy the drive is. The silence of the machine is wonderful, if a little weird :)
 
DamienThorn said:
Well, I ended up getting a Vertex 2 240GB SSD, and I'm incredibly impressed with how snappy the drive is. The silence of the machine is wonderful, if a little weird :)
Click to expand...

nice! I agree on the sound bit. I thought my fan had gotten louder, but I realized I was just not having to hear the HDD spin.
 
ryken said:
nice! I agree on the sound bit. I thought my fan had gotten louder, but I realized I was just not having to hear the HDD spin.
Click to expand...

The best comparison is when you OptiBay the HDD, and use the SSD as your boot drive. Then, whenever the HDD spins up during operation, you can hear just how loud it is!

Opposite of "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?"
 
Getting the HDD OUT of the iMac is the single best thing you can do. The reduction in noise and heat inside the unit is the best thing you can do for it.
 
ryken said:
nice! I agree on the sound bit. I thought my fan had gotten louder, but I realized I was just not having to hear the HDD spin.
Click to expand...

Only time that I hear my computer now is if I'm beating the hell out of the CPU or GPU, or (obviously) using the optical bay. As someone who spent a fortune years ago in silent (PC) computing, this is almost at the point of nirvana :p
 
i am waiting until i have some more cash, so i can buy one ssd for my mac mini. the difference of having a ssd in enormous, huge leap forward, it is just insane.
 
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