MacBook Pro SSD Upgrade
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.
but how fast do the tests run now? Inquiring minds want to know.
Sadly, the SSD did very little for test performance.
Thankfully, all that benchmarking helped lead the way to using REE to cut the time in half.
Thanks for contributing. It’s helped me undsreatnd the issues.
Any difference in battery life?