Just as someone launched its topic detailing its experience with using an iPad as a sole computing device, here is mine with first SSD ever to hit one of my machines.
Seeing a very good special for a 120GB SSD from OWC at $80, I caved in an bought it. A few days ago, it arrived, nicely packed, with a nice, metallic blue finish. Felt light, almost too light even though I know SSDs can withstand most shocks without breaking. I guess I'm from the "weight is quality" generation.
Too eager to try it, I installed it in my MacBook, 2009 era: 2.13GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, in lieu and place of the factory 160GB spinner. Why not my main machine? For the quite simple reason 120GB is much too small for my main MBP.
So I proceeded on installing a clean Lion copy on it from the external image stored on a FW400 HDD. It comes to no surprise the installation itself took less than 20 minutes. I guess this was the maximum speed that could be achieved from an external spinner holding an image not optimized at all for rotating media, meaning more seek time.
Then came the updating process itself. Searching for updates was extremely fast. I'd say 3 to 5 times faster than on a rotating disk. Installation was equally fast. But by the time I installed just a few apps such as Firefox, Evernote, and configured Mail not to keep any local copy of messages, I had more than half of HDD space used. This was to be expected I guess.
But what about actual usage? I fired up Safari, opened many tabs in this notoriously RAM-hungry browser, as well as some other apps I had time to install. While I never felt the same degree of slowdown typical when a traditional machine hits the swap on a spinner, performance wasn't quite an order of magnitude increased so many described from upgrading to an SSD. To me, it seemed more like a "clean" machine should perform. In fact, I remember getting such reactivity from my first computer back in 1999 when it got Windows 2000 in it, when applications were much lighter overall and tabbed browsing never heard of. Even back then a Celeron wasn't considered a powerhouse.
Technically speaking, this Mac is capable of 3Gbit/s, but only negotiated the SSD link to 1.5Gbit/s, while the SSD is 6Gbit/s-rated. What would be the reason why the Mac doesn't negotiate a 3Gbit/s link? Is such a good but not stellar performance due to forgetting some kind of configuration on the drive, like enabling TRIM? Seeing that more as a test-drive, it doesn't makes me want to spend hundreds to upgrade my main machine to SSD.
Seeing a very good special for a 120GB SSD from OWC at $80, I caved in an bought it. A few days ago, it arrived, nicely packed, with a nice, metallic blue finish. Felt light, almost too light even though I know SSDs can withstand most shocks without breaking. I guess I'm from the "weight is quality" generation.
Too eager to try it, I installed it in my MacBook, 2009 era: 2.13GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, in lieu and place of the factory 160GB spinner. Why not my main machine? For the quite simple reason 120GB is much too small for my main MBP.
So I proceeded on installing a clean Lion copy on it from the external image stored on a FW400 HDD. It comes to no surprise the installation itself took less than 20 minutes. I guess this was the maximum speed that could be achieved from an external spinner holding an image not optimized at all for rotating media, meaning more seek time.
Then came the updating process itself. Searching for updates was extremely fast. I'd say 3 to 5 times faster than on a rotating disk. Installation was equally fast. But by the time I installed just a few apps such as Firefox, Evernote, and configured Mail not to keep any local copy of messages, I had more than half of HDD space used. This was to be expected I guess.
But what about actual usage? I fired up Safari, opened many tabs in this notoriously RAM-hungry browser, as well as some other apps I had time to install. While I never felt the same degree of slowdown typical when a traditional machine hits the swap on a spinner, performance wasn't quite an order of magnitude increased so many described from upgrading to an SSD. To me, it seemed more like a "clean" machine should perform. In fact, I remember getting such reactivity from my first computer back in 1999 when it got Windows 2000 in it, when applications were much lighter overall and tabbed browsing never heard of. Even back then a Celeron wasn't considered a powerhouse.
Technically speaking, this Mac is capable of 3Gbit/s, but only negotiated the SSD link to 1.5Gbit/s, while the SSD is 6Gbit/s-rated. What would be the reason why the Mac doesn't negotiate a 3Gbit/s link? Is such a good but not stellar performance due to forgetting some kind of configuration on the drive, like enabling TRIM? Seeing that more as a test-drive, it doesn't makes me want to spend hundreds to upgrade my main machine to SSD.