...And I absolutely love it! I have a 2008 Aluminum 2ghz Macbook (Aluminum), and the added SSD that I replaced the 160gb HDD with really sped things up a bit. Well more than a bit. I boot to a usable desktop in less than 14 seconds flat. For what this computer is, that is pretty rad.
Just goes to show you how capable your hardware is. As a graphic design student I am in Adobe Creative Suite throughout my day. I also spend quite a bit of time in Word doing papers for school. I love the fact that the programs are so responsive now. The Intel x-25 80gb was perfect for me. I have 40 gigs of Apps with a 3 gig iPhoto library. I used the internal drive I replaced as an iTunes and dowloads drive and it works perfect for my 30 or so gigs of music.
I did buy an external Sata to USB drve to use a 320GB 7200 Hitachi I bought off eBay. When I plug that in and turn it on at home, I back my system up. It is also storage. So I got the little notebook drive I carry everywhere and the home solution. Things are grand now.
I never realized how much of a bottleneck a hard drive can be to a cpu. When you put an SSD in a computer, even a 2.0ghz c2d chip can speed through most of todays applications. I am finding that working with large images (over 100megs) is a breeze and loading brushes and filters, etc.
If you want to get performance out of your computer I urge you to drop in an SSD. I have had my drive filled to test it out and it now resides comfortable at 40 gigs of the 80. I have noticed no degredation in performance in this drive either. When I installed it I did install from a Time Machine backup and last week I decided to do a clean reformat and install of everything (which is easy using OSX, much less of a headache than using Windows). I used to loathe formatting in Windows. In OSX it just took the better part of an afternoon. If I missed something, I just went into the backup on the home storage and pulled it from the backup disk. Nice.
Installing the drive in the Macbook was particularly easy, even though I didn't have the required Torq driver. I used pliers and gripped each screw firm and just used enough pressure to unlock the screw and unscrewed them by hand. I repeated the process in reverse to get them on again.
The absolute first thing anyone should do when getting an SSD, especially this one, is update the firmware. I noticed a 10% increase in performance from the drive. Well.... maybe 5-10%. I also disabled the sudden motion sensor in the Macbook as the SSD has its own. I also got a nifty program called SmartSleep and enabled classic sleep mode so that when my computer sleeps it doesn't write the ram contents to disk. I also deleted the hiberante file (got 4 gigs of space back in the process).
Needless to say this was the best 230 bucks I have spent in recent times. Other than upgrading the ram to 4gbs in this Mac, I have not done anything else. Its speedy enough for me to use for whatever. I think I will sit this refresh out and wait for the next Macbook Pro refresh. SSD drives will let you squeeze some nice performance from your computer and are really worth it. I am one happy camper. I followed all your advice and got the x-25 and could not be more pleased.
Like I recall someone saying, "Just get the Intel gen-2 one and use the hell out of it and don't worry." I would also like to add that shutting down the Macbook now is amazingly fast too. For reference, I have had many hard drives and even a few 7200rpm drives and this is by far the absolute best. Thanks Intel, well done.
And now.. I must go play some Warcraft 3 or Torchlight till the wife gets off work. : ) By the way, off topic i know, but there was an update to SixtyForce recently and n64 games play like a dream. : )
Just goes to show you how capable your hardware is. As a graphic design student I am in Adobe Creative Suite throughout my day. I also spend quite a bit of time in Word doing papers for school. I love the fact that the programs are so responsive now. The Intel x-25 80gb was perfect for me. I have 40 gigs of Apps with a 3 gig iPhoto library. I used the internal drive I replaced as an iTunes and dowloads drive and it works perfect for my 30 or so gigs of music.
I did buy an external Sata to USB drve to use a 320GB 7200 Hitachi I bought off eBay. When I plug that in and turn it on at home, I back my system up. It is also storage. So I got the little notebook drive I carry everywhere and the home solution. Things are grand now.
I never realized how much of a bottleneck a hard drive can be to a cpu. When you put an SSD in a computer, even a 2.0ghz c2d chip can speed through most of todays applications. I am finding that working with large images (over 100megs) is a breeze and loading brushes and filters, etc.
If you want to get performance out of your computer I urge you to drop in an SSD. I have had my drive filled to test it out and it now resides comfortable at 40 gigs of the 80. I have noticed no degredation in performance in this drive either. When I installed it I did install from a Time Machine backup and last week I decided to do a clean reformat and install of everything (which is easy using OSX, much less of a headache than using Windows). I used to loathe formatting in Windows. In OSX it just took the better part of an afternoon. If I missed something, I just went into the backup on the home storage and pulled it from the backup disk. Nice.
Installing the drive in the Macbook was particularly easy, even though I didn't have the required Torq driver. I used pliers and gripped each screw firm and just used enough pressure to unlock the screw and unscrewed them by hand. I repeated the process in reverse to get them on again.
The absolute first thing anyone should do when getting an SSD, especially this one, is update the firmware. I noticed a 10% increase in performance from the drive. Well.... maybe 5-10%. I also disabled the sudden motion sensor in the Macbook as the SSD has its own. I also got a nifty program called SmartSleep and enabled classic sleep mode so that when my computer sleeps it doesn't write the ram contents to disk. I also deleted the hiberante file (got 4 gigs of space back in the process).
Needless to say this was the best 230 bucks I have spent in recent times. Other than upgrading the ram to 4gbs in this Mac, I have not done anything else. Its speedy enough for me to use for whatever. I think I will sit this refresh out and wait for the next Macbook Pro refresh. SSD drives will let you squeeze some nice performance from your computer and are really worth it. I am one happy camper. I followed all your advice and got the x-25 and could not be more pleased.
Like I recall someone saying, "Just get the Intel gen-2 one and use the hell out of it and don't worry." I would also like to add that shutting down the Macbook now is amazingly fast too. For reference, I have had many hard drives and even a few 7200rpm drives and this is by far the absolute best. Thanks Intel, well done.
And now.. I must go play some Warcraft 3 or Torchlight till the wife gets off work. : ) By the way, off topic i know, but there was an update to SixtyForce recently and n64 games play like a dream. : )
.
