SSD power for my Mac

I thought about buying a SSD to replace my hard drive in my Macbook for a long time now. You don’t know what a SSD is? Well, traditional hard drives (HDD) use spinning discs to write data on them and break easily if they suffer from a heavy bump for instance. Solid state drives (SSD) are microchip based drives that are already heavily in use in cell phones or digital cameras. The biggest advantages of SSDs are their blasting speed, high robustness (you can literally hit them with a baseball bat and they won’t lose your data) and low power consumption. A huge disadvantage is the high price and little data storage. Currently you pay approx. 300€ for a 128GB SSD.

However, videos like this one and reading how amazed people are by the performance boost that comes with the switch made me really curious. I studied a bit on which SSD to buy and decided to go with the Corsair Nova 128GB version, even though Intel is still dominating the SSD market. Enthusiasts will tell you that in terms of sustainability and performance nothing comes close to an Intel Postville for instance, but tests have shown, that Corsair’s new model most definitely is a good alternative to the pricy Intel drives. Corsair promises a reading speed of 190 MB/s and writing at 270 MB/s. Well, here come the results.

Installation was easy, done a quick reinstall of Snow Leopard and then I was ready for the journey on the fast lane. I am still impressed. Comparing read and write speeds you can imagine what is happening on my computer now. Bootup is really quick, but more important application and file handling is supreme: the whole system just snaps! For launching Adobe Illustrator my Mac normally took about 15 seconds, now it opens in less than 3!

Concluding I can say that replacing the HDD for a SSD really is the performance upgrade #1 you can achieve at the moment and is just worth the money!