My SSD experience

I finally bought a SSD for my MBP! I was waiting for either the OCX Vertex or Agility 60gb to drop below $130, and last week I picked up a Vertex for $130 AR. I got it today, so I spent all day setting it set up.

I swapped out my old 320gb 7200RPM disk for the SSD, and I did a fresh install of Snow Leopard. It started up fine, and I installed all the system updates so everything would be up-to-date before migrating my data over. Downloading the combo update and itunes took over 2 hours on my internet connection, which will probably negate any time the SSD will ever save me.

Once the system was up-to-date, I used migration assistant to move my data over. The old drive sat in a USB enclosure, and the transfer process took about 30 minutes to an hour. I selected everything except the folders that have all my large files (Documents, Downloads, Music, Movies, etc), and now I am left with 5gb free on the SSD. (I need to clean out my applications.)

Now, left with my user account with no data, I had to find a way to link everything over. I tried itunes first, pointing it to the itunes folder on my old disk, but it didn't like that, and nothing showed up in the library. After some research about how to mount folders somewhere else, the best thing I could find was to create a sym link to the desired location. Here's how to do it for the music folder:

Code:

sudo rm -r /Users/matt/Music
sudo ln -s /Volumes/320gb/Users/matt/Music /Users/matt/Music

And that's it. (warning: the rm command will delete the existing folder because it should be empty on a clean install.) I started up itunes, and it recognized my library but took a few minutes to "import" it or something. I repeated the process for the rest of my folders, and now everything shows up in /Users/matt/whatever as if I was still on a single disk. The stacks in my dock updated themselves, and even my desktop works seamlessly. I still have to get an optibay adapter to put the hard drive in the optical bay, but I don't expect any problems with that.

OS X crashed on me when it went to sleep on its own after some of the updates downloaded, and kernel panicked when it tried to resume from the safe sleep data, but I've put it to sleep and deep sleep a couple times since with no problems. The mechanical drive in the USB enclosure shuts off as soon as the computer goes to sleep (while safesleep data is being saved to the SSD), and I assume it will do the same thing in the optibay. That's good because I will no longer have to wait for the computer to finish saving safesleep data before I move it.

I don't anticipate any significant change in battery life since I will have the old drive in an optibay. Since a good portion of my data will still be on there, I won't be able to shut it off to save power either.

The computer takes about 25 seconds to get to the login screen, and about 5-10 seconds from there. That's good enough for me. Matlab starts in about 15 seconds instead of 45 seconds to a minute on the old disk, which is a huge improvement.

Attached are xbench scores of the drive as it is now on the left, and as it was brand-new on the right. Write speeds are actually faster, so no degradation, and I suspect any differences are within normal variability.

Overall I'm extremely happy with the SSD, and the install process went a lot smoother than I expected.

 

Hm... My desktop disappeared overnight. If I browse to the Desktop folder everything is there, but if I look at the actual desktop, there is nothing. Restarting will probably fix it. I hope this doesn't have any affect on the working of the system (things that expect the Documents folder to be in the right place, for example).

I just installed Steam, and it seems to have no problem downloading Portal to my mechanical disk (the Documents folder), which is good since it's a 5gb download.

 

I got my NewModeUS Optibay today. It was easy enough to install, and everything works the same as when the drive was in the USB enclosure. The desktop reappeared after rebooting to install the optibay, and hopefully it won't disappear again.

Deep sleep works as expected, and I haven't tried regular sleep yet.