SSD Success

A while back I posted about how I upgraded the hard drive on my (now old) MacBook Pro.  Since then, I’ve upgraded to a newer 15" MacBook pro and have been really happy with it.  I’ve also started using a MacBook Air at work, and I did notice that the startup times and overall snappiness of my Air were much better than my Pro.

Given that my MacBook Pro has higher specs, I chalked the performance up to the Solid State Drive on my Air.  So I set out to find a good deal online and came across this drive: Crucial 256 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s (CT256M4SSD2).

When I purchased it on Amazon.com the price was $199, which is pretty good for a 256GB hard drive.  The prices of SSDs have come down considerably in the past year.  I did a bit of spring cleaning on my old hard drive to clear up space and found that 256GB is ample space for all my data and leaves room for growth.

Installation was a piece of cake, and I just restored the latest backup from my Time Capsule.  When installing my previous HDD I did have some issues using an older installation DVD for this, but I was able to use a Snow Leopard disc to restore a Lion backup.  2 hours later my system was restored to the new drive and everything was ready to go.

I’ve noticed a significant increase in boot times, application loading times and general performance.  Heck, I’ve even seen dungeons in Diablo III load faster.  Bonus!

Hopefully this configuration will keep me happy for a while and not want to pickup one of the new MacBooks that Apple is expected to release at WWDC 2012.  I’d highly recommend upgrading to an SSD, especially considering how much prices have dropped recently.