Notes regarding my recent switch of my Macbook Unibody White hard drive to an SSD:

I bought the SSD (Kingston SSDNow V series 64 GB) because I understood it to be a good one and the price was right (on sale with rebate bringing the price of the drive to 110 dollars after all was said and done.) I figured it was a good idea given SSD benefits such as low power requirements, resilience, low noise (not that this was an issue in the MacBook), and speed. Granted, this is a medium consumer grade SSD and at least a generation behind in SSD technology but I thought it might be worth a shot. I’m interested in the potential of SSDs and it seemed like the time to jump in.

I haven’t done anything resembling scientific testing, mind you. Haven’t even bothered. I wouldn’t know what to do for that kind of thing anyway. But I can make note of what I’ve seen.

First thing was that I was ill prepared for how small a space the SSD offers. Certainly I knew it was only 64 gigabytes to begin with but I hadn’t really made much of a dent in my 500 gigabyte drive in the MacBook as it was. Still, formatted the drive is in the range of a mere 58 gigabytes and my entire drive’s contents would not fit. I left out large amounts of data I could safely leave behind and imaged the rest of the drive to the SSD. Now, I might have expected this portion to be faster but there were significant bottlenecks such as the SSD being tethered to a USB 2.0 interface as well as the speed of the current drive.

I left the drive to image in its own time and returned and swapped out the drives. Curiously, I found first that the process had worked (a pleasant surprise), and that the boot process was not faster but slower. This is an issue I have yet to work out as I don’t believe it to be the fault of the SSD exactly, but rather an issue with the Mac finding the SSD to be the boot disk. After the Apple appears, boot is no more than about five seconds, with the total time to a ‘usable desktop’ being no more than about seven or eight, not counting actually typing in my password. So boot time is, pretty much, very very fast. However… I don’t boot that often. The machine sleeps, I don’t turn it off.

Wake from sleep is fast, definitely much faster than it is with a regular hard drive, so that’s helpful. The machine has not instantly become any kind of speed demon but it does seem plenty perky, over all maybe a bit more than it had been. It’s tricky to say, as this particular machine has impressed me with how swift it can be given its modest outfitting (2.26 GHz Core2Duo cpu with 3 MB L2 cache and 2 GB DDR3-1066 MHz RAM shared with the integrated Geforce 9400 graphics).

Battery life has not skyrocketed through the roof either. But I don’t think I’ve done a full drain and charge just yet so that’d be worth monitoring.

Trash empties fast. Using the ‘XSlimmer’ utility to strip out excess languages and legacy code from the Applications folder was swift but not mind blowing fast.

The place where the hard drive is is definitely cooler to the touch. At least there’s that. I don’t mind that at all.

And while I was so very concerned before, almost half of the drive remains available at the moment so I suppose I was fair but overzealous in my slimming down of, basically, all of my data, which was not very crucial at all and will be fine on the old drive where it remains for now.