In a solid state

posted by Jeff | Friday, February 25, 2011, 10:27 PM | comments: 0

Apple updated their laptop line this week, and as much as I was hoping for something like a 15" model in a MacBook Air form factor, that didn't happen. The refreshed line is mostly faster processors and Intel's newer architecture. The bottom line is that I wouldn't likely see any kind of boost in any of the kinds of things I typically do if I replaced my 2-year-old 17" MacBook Pro.

I still very much enjoy working and playing on my laptop, and though I entertained replacing it this year, it really is kind of silly to even think about it. That said, it doesn't mean that I'm unwilling to tweak it up a little, and for that, I thought it would be a good idea to put a solid state hard drive in it. SSD's are still not particularly cheap, but the performance gains you can achieve with them are in many cases pretty extreme.

My friend Aaron put one of these OWC drives in his 15", and felt pretty good about the results. They rank somewhere toward the middle of the field in terms of performance, but they have these great kits to add a drive in place of your DVD drive (who uses those anymore?), and they come with the right tools and super detailed instructions. They cost a little more too, but with such care given to making it idiot proof to install, that's a worthy tradeoff.

So my plan was to get a 240 gig drive and make that my primary, and put the regular 300 gig, 5400 rpm drive in the DVD slot. If I really need a DVD drive, I have a USB drive I can use. The SSD will then be my boot drive, and the place where I keep my VM's for dev work, while the mechanical drive will be where I dump media, and leave the Boot Camp partition, which I rarely use except for phone development. The idea is to get as much speed out of every day stuff and running the VM's.

The install went pretty well, and copying the 200 gigs or so of data took about two hours. The first time I booted from the SSD, I almost had to gasp for air. I couldn't believe how fast it was. It used to take over a minute to boot a Windows VM, now it takes about 25 seconds. Starting Visual Studio cold, with Resharper enabled and loading the POP Forums v9 project takes 25 seconds from click to having the solution explorer. Building the solution, north of 17k lines of code with over 200 files takes three seconds. Running the 600 tests takes 11 seconds. I'm in awe. The Windows performance index gives the drive a 7.3, and that's through a VM!

Everything just runs faster. Photoshop loads in a few seconds. Web browsing, of all things, is snappier (presumably because of how the browser uses the disk cache). It will be interesting to see if there's a major effect on battery life, since the mechanical drive should be spun down if I'm not using it.

Overall, I'm super satisfied, and it feels like I have a new computer. It reminds me of the old days, when you replaced all of your desktop computer parts, one by one, until you virtually had a new computer, almost on an annual basis. That was geeky fun, but it never felt like you had something visibly better. This is pretty dramatic.


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