DCDeac
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Just thought I'd post a quick thread on my laptop upgrade this weekend just in case anyone's interested.
I'm sure most tech folks here already know the benefits of solid state drives and many have even have put them in their machines already, but if you haven't considered it it might be worth a look, especially for a laptop that is showing its age.
Here's an article detailing the basics http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57565647-1/whoa-i-should-have-upgraded-to-an-ssd-last-year/
After reading that I looked into replacing my 2009 Macbook Pro's 320gb standard hard drive with an SSD one. I quickly realized that a like-sized drive was going to be prohibitively expensive (I'm trying to get another year of so out of it, so another $400 doesn't make sense). Turns out the DVD drive (which I never ever use) is also a SATA drive, so you can put the SSD there and use your old drive as extra storage.
I ended up getting this kit: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DDMBSSD120/
For $150 you get a 120GB SSD, a mounting bracket and adapter to replace your optical drive, and the tools and instructions for all Macbooks covered by that solution.
The install is not for total novices, but you don't have to be a super-geek to do it either. Basically you unscrew the back cover, disconnect a few (admittedly fragile) cables, pop out the DVD drive, replace it with your SSD drive in the new bracket, reconnect everything and you're done. In my case I wasn't quite careful enough and almost screwed up one of the cables when I reattached it, but in the end it worked out.
In the Mac Mountain Lion world, you can simply reboot to a recovery USB key or disk, partition the new drive, and then reinstall a fresh copy of the OS. When you restart it'll boot off the new drive automatically, and your old disk will be available as well. You can either port the whole thing, or do what most people do - re-install software on your SSD and put your images, music, and video/large files on your old drive. All pretty easy.
The reason I'm posting is mainly because the results were shockingly good. I went from about a 2 minute boot time to under 20 seconds. Firefox used to load in 30 seconds or so, now it's 5 seconds. Word and Excel launch pretty much instantaneously. It literally feels like a new computer - if I told someone I replaced the dual core CPU with a quad core i7 and went to 16gb of memory they'd probably believe me. My XP virtual machine in parallels opens in 10 seconds or less - and rebooting the entire image still only takes 15-30 seconds. Also added maybe 30 minutes to my battery life.
I assume the results are similar for Windows machines based on that article, although I can't vouch for the ease of the upgrade. Outside of adding memory to get you to 8GB, this is easily the best upgrade I've ever done value-wise. Just don't strip any screws, and be really careful with the cables!
I'm sure most tech folks here already know the benefits of solid state drives and many have even have put them in their machines already, but if you haven't considered it it might be worth a look, especially for a laptop that is showing its age.
Here's an article detailing the basics http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57565647-1/whoa-i-should-have-upgraded-to-an-ssd-last-year/
After reading that I looked into replacing my 2009 Macbook Pro's 320gb standard hard drive with an SSD one. I quickly realized that a like-sized drive was going to be prohibitively expensive (I'm trying to get another year of so out of it, so another $400 doesn't make sense). Turns out the DVD drive (which I never ever use) is also a SATA drive, so you can put the SSD there and use your old drive as extra storage.
I ended up getting this kit: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DDMBSSD120/
For $150 you get a 120GB SSD, a mounting bracket and adapter to replace your optical drive, and the tools and instructions for all Macbooks covered by that solution.
The install is not for total novices, but you don't have to be a super-geek to do it either. Basically you unscrew the back cover, disconnect a few (admittedly fragile) cables, pop out the DVD drive, replace it with your SSD drive in the new bracket, reconnect everything and you're done. In my case I wasn't quite careful enough and almost screwed up one of the cables when I reattached it, but in the end it worked out.
In the Mac Mountain Lion world, you can simply reboot to a recovery USB key or disk, partition the new drive, and then reinstall a fresh copy of the OS. When you restart it'll boot off the new drive automatically, and your old disk will be available as well. You can either port the whole thing, or do what most people do - re-install software on your SSD and put your images, music, and video/large files on your old drive. All pretty easy.
The reason I'm posting is mainly because the results were shockingly good. I went from about a 2 minute boot time to under 20 seconds. Firefox used to load in 30 seconds or so, now it's 5 seconds. Word and Excel launch pretty much instantaneously. It literally feels like a new computer - if I told someone I replaced the dual core CPU with a quad core i7 and went to 16gb of memory they'd probably believe me. My XP virtual machine in parallels opens in 10 seconds or less - and rebooting the entire image still only takes 15-30 seconds. Also added maybe 30 minutes to my battery life.
I assume the results are similar for Windows machines based on that article, although I can't vouch for the ease of the upgrade. Outside of adding memory to get you to 8GB, this is easily the best upgrade I've ever done value-wise. Just don't strip any screws, and be really careful with the cables!
hybrid? I've heard bad things about those. More power to you if it's made a big difference though.
