Early last week I convinced my employer, xtendx AG, that I needed one of those new, fancy Intel X25M G2 Solid State Drives for my 18 month old early-2008 MacBook Pro. The prices had finally come down to a tolerable sweet-spot for us: ~SFr500 for the 160GB model from a favored local electronics store, Digitec AG.

Last Monday evening at home I opened up my MBP and dropped in the new SSD. The instructions I used to do this can be found on iFixIt.com. In the below photograph, the new drive is on the left.

It took about 90 minutes, but I took some of that time to clean our the dust and grime from the case interior. Note that it is really important to have a T6 Torx screwdriver on hand. Don't even attempt this operation without one.

After getting the drive installed I needed to format it, and install OS X. That went amazingly quickly. Especially the format. I did not time it. But trust me, it was fast!

You don't trust me? OK. Here are some benchmarks and a graph. The data was gathered using Xbench 3.1 on my newly modified MBP and an identical MBP of my colleague's. The raw results:

Wow! Some of those numbers are absolutely amazing, like the 4k Block Random Write. Below we have a graph of the improvement in performance over the stock 7,200 RPM drive.

Percent Improvement in Performance by Xbench Test

There are two things to remember when interpreting the above graph:

• The y-scale is logarithmic. This is because some of the numbers where so large the smaller values, although important, seemed nominal.
• The values are the % improvement over the original hard drive.

"Uh, whatever" you say? Here are some points on how to interpreter the data:

• A value of 100% means the performance was doubled
• A value of 1000% indicates the performance was ten times better
• <10% is probably not that noticeable to most users

Now do you believe me?!?! An SSD as an upgrade will dramatically change your computing experience.

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Posted by Stu Thompson on 20 December 2009 19:01:00 CET #