Greetz- Have a good friend with a '08 white Macbook (4,1, 2.4ghz, 2gb ram, 160gb HD, Snow Leopard) that had become super slow. Turns out the drive was 96% full. Talked them into spending $150 on a 500gb Momentus XT Hybrid (ssd/hd) drive. I did the swap for them. Once I found a #00 phillips, the hardware swap took under 10 minutes.
I'm not a synthetic benchmarks fan, and "it seems faster" drives me crazy, so I did some SIMPLE "real world" benchmarks. General ground rules were I ran permissions repair on both the old and new drive immediately before test, as well as "sudo periodic daily weekly monthly" prior to benching. I also cleared up another 25gb of space on the "old" drive to attempt to reach some level of parity (e.g. so hopefully the old system performance wouldn't be too devastatingly penalized due to lack of free HD space). Finally, I "trained" the hybrid by rebooting and loading apps three times prior to testing...
So anyway, here are the results, non-scientific for sure, but it's what I got:
It absolutely "feels" like a different machine. $150 well spent. Hope this data is of some use to folks....
Sorry for the confusing columns, first number is old drive, in seconds, second is the hybrid, third is the difference, fourth is % improvement
<measurements in seconds> SPEED IMPROVEMENT
Old HD New HD secs. %
160gb HD 500gb Hybrid
start up to login 45.2 25.2
login until ready 19.4 2.5
TOTAL STARTUP TIME 64.6 27.7 36.9 57.12%
Application Load Times:
safari 12.9 3.3 9.6 74.42%
iphoto 12.0 3.3 8.7 72.50%
itunes 7.8 2.7 5.1 65.38%
word 9.4 4.3 5.1 54.26%
shut down, no apps 9.9 3.8 6.1 61.62%
I'm not a synthetic benchmarks fan, and "it seems faster" drives me crazy, so I did some SIMPLE "real world" benchmarks. General ground rules were I ran permissions repair on both the old and new drive immediately before test, as well as "sudo periodic daily weekly monthly" prior to benching. I also cleared up another 25gb of space on the "old" drive to attempt to reach some level of parity (e.g. so hopefully the old system performance wouldn't be too devastatingly penalized due to lack of free HD space). Finally, I "trained" the hybrid by rebooting and loading apps three times prior to testing...
So anyway, here are the results, non-scientific for sure, but it's what I got:
It absolutely "feels" like a different machine. $150 well spent. Hope this data is of some use to folks....
Sorry for the confusing columns, first number is old drive, in seconds, second is the hybrid, third is the difference, fourth is % improvement
<measurements in seconds> SPEED IMPROVEMENT
Old HD New HD secs. %
160gb HD 500gb Hybrid
start up to login 45.2 25.2
login until ready 19.4 2.5
TOTAL STARTUP TIME 64.6 27.7 36.9 57.12%
Application Load Times:
safari 12.9 3.3 9.6 74.42%
iphoto 12.0 3.3 8.7 72.50%
itunes 7.8 2.7 5.1 65.38%
word 9.4 4.3 5.1 54.26%
shut down, no apps 9.9 3.8 6.1 61.62%
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