Winfield Peterson: Object Oriented Pragmatism

I’ve been suffering with abysmal disk performance on my work laptop for some time, so I decided to pick up an OCZ Vertex2 SSD on sale over Black Friday and 8gigs of RAM. Total cost for both was under $300 (though the same from Apple would have been about $1200).

I wanted to get OSX re-installed, data migrated, and my development environment setup on my own time without wasting productive work time, so I did the following:

• Installed SSD in USB enclosure
• Installed OSX on SSD Drive as secondary
• Migrated Data/Apps from old internal drive
• Boot off of USB/SSD and finish config
• Install SSD as primary drive

Everything went smoothly. Here’s the disk portion of a system XBench benchmark before/after:

Overall, about an 8x performance increase split between 4x for Sequential Read/Write and 28x for Random Access. The system boots up in about 15 seconds now. Applications load very quickly, Chrome with 10-12 saved tabs opens in about 1 second.