Just got my Mediasonic "ProBox" 2.5" USB3 hard drive enclosure ($15 on Amazon) today in the mail. I put in my Mushkin Chronos 120GB SSD ($84 on Newegg), copied my boot partition to it, rebooted it, and it worked like a charm on the first try. The difference in performance is unbelievable.
According to the Blackmagic speed test app, I'm getting ~130 MB/s write speeds and ~180 MB/s read speeds. Basically it has twice the bandwidth of the standard internal hard drive, but of course the main selling point is the low latency. I would say apps launch up to 10 times faster and even just surfing to various web pages is about twice as fast.
I'm very happy with this setup and will say that I don't see the point of ordering the SSD or Fusion upgrade from Apple considering the price, or installing an SSD internally, when you can buy whatever SSD you want, put it in this $15 enclosure and basically have the same performance, practically speaking.
According to the Blackmagic speed test app, I'm getting ~130 MB/s write speeds and ~180 MB/s read speeds. Basically it has twice the bandwidth of the standard internal hard drive, but of course the main selling point is the low latency. I would say apps launch up to 10 times faster and even just surfing to various web pages is about twice as fast.
I'm very happy with this setup and will say that I don't see the point of ordering the SSD or Fusion upgrade from Apple considering the price, or installing an SSD internally, when you can buy whatever SSD you want, put it in this $15 enclosure and basically have the same performance, practically speaking.