Like may of us in this forum I was interested in upgrading to an SSD as a boot device. Mine finally arrived from Amazon - the 80GB retail version - and I wanted to share a few experiences.
First, the retail version has a mounting plate, so one doesn't need to buy a IcyDock, MaxUpgrades or other mounting gear. As I'd already bought an icyDock I used that. Oh, well.
I'm using about 40% of the 80GB. No problem with space for me.
Boot times seem to be cut in half. I force a user id/password check at boot. It's a bit over twenty seconds from the time I press the power-on button. No, I didn't use a stop watch.
Many apps start up much more quickly. Yes, the MS Office apps are still rather piggy and seem to take forever. But they are much better than previously, probably by about 50%.
I was surprised to see that Secure Empty Trash - which I always do - is now incredibly fast. I assumed that the trash directory existed on the ~user tree (I had separated my user data onto a separate disk some time ago). So this is a mystery, but a welcome one. Perhaps someone can shed some light.
The new disk allowed some reconfiguration. I have four disks now: the SSD boot disk; a 350GB disk that is partitioned into a backup boot disk/Windows XP disk; a 500GB user data disk; and a 500GB spare disk that I am considering using as a Time Machine disk (still not sure of TM). And I have a large firewire disk I use to back everything up. Who knows, maybe I'll build a dedicated Widows disk once Windows 7 arrives.
All in all I am pleased with the speed improvement and more flexible disk configuration alternatives. I now tend to shut the machine down rather than put it to sleep as booting is so much faster. Clearly, I don't have the massive data needs that some of you do. Nor do I follow the RAID prescription as I take a completely different approach to redundancy and backup (spent many years analyzing RAID use in enterprise computing environments).
Just my two cents ($240, actually) ... YMMV
First, the retail version has a mounting plate, so one doesn't need to buy a IcyDock, MaxUpgrades or other mounting gear. As I'd already bought an icyDock I used that. Oh, well.
I'm using about 40% of the 80GB. No problem with space for me.
Boot times seem to be cut in half. I force a user id/password check at boot. It's a bit over twenty seconds from the time I press the power-on button. No, I didn't use a stop watch.
Many apps start up much more quickly. Yes, the MS Office apps are still rather piggy and seem to take forever. But they are much better than previously, probably by about 50%.
I was surprised to see that Secure Empty Trash - which I always do - is now incredibly fast. I assumed that the trash directory existed on the ~user tree (I had separated my user data onto a separate disk some time ago). So this is a mystery, but a welcome one. Perhaps someone can shed some light.
The new disk allowed some reconfiguration. I have four disks now: the SSD boot disk; a 350GB disk that is partitioned into a backup boot disk/Windows XP disk; a 500GB user data disk; and a 500GB spare disk that I am considering using as a Time Machine disk (still not sure of TM). And I have a large firewire disk I use to back everything up. Who knows, maybe I'll build a dedicated Widows disk once Windows 7 arrives.
All in all I am pleased with the speed improvement and more flexible disk configuration alternatives. I now tend to shut the machine down rather than put it to sleep as booting is so much faster. Clearly, I don't have the massive data needs that some of you do. Nor do I follow the RAID prescription as I take a completely different approach to redundancy and backup (spent many years analyzing RAID use in enterprise computing environments).
Just my two cents ($240, actually) ... YMMV
