SSDs have come down in price drastically over the past few years. At first, the drives had exorbitant prices to match the performance that they offered; now, even though they still offer extreme speeds, those prices have gone down to the point that they are much more accessible to a majority of people – including me.
Even though I’m still actively weighing my options for my next laptop, I currently have an expensive one – a MacBook Pro – that isn’t holding its own anymore. From the clicks and noises that are coming from the inside of it, I can only assume that the problem lies in not only the aging Core 2 Duo processor that’s inside, but also the 5400RPM hard drive.
There is no better way to fix a dying hard drive than to replace it, of course, but 5400RPM drives can only take performance so far. Plus, faster hard drives inevitably – and unfortunately - bring louder noise, produce more heat, and require more power, thus sucking down whatever my already shoddy battery can actually hold. So it was obvious to me that a traditional hard drive was out of the question.
That led me to a two week investigation of the various types of SSDs. I looked at just about every vendor, from Intel to Samsung to OWC, and at every model in their lineups.
My 2010 MacBook Pro utilizes a SATA II connection, but I obviously didn’t let that stop me from looking at SATA III drives. SATA III drives are backwards compatible, with the only downside being that you won’t get the full, advertised speeds if you use them on a SATA II connection. At the same time, this computer is getting old, and when I do get my new one, it’ll be nice to have an SSD that’ll give my system the fastest performance possible.
With that out of the way, the only other important factor was price: I wanted to find a good drive for under $200. Size wasn’t much of an issue, since my entire music library is essentially Spotify’s, and any videos that I would want to watch would be on my iPad. I decided, however, that 80GB was the lowest capacity that I could choose.
Thankfully, there’s a nice selection of SSDs for under $200 with at least 120GB of storage. That fit my bill perfectly, so I set out looking for the best drive within my price and size ranges.
To start, I looked through Newegg’s selection. There were plenty of great options, of course, but they were usually around $150 and would mean that I would have to buy some additional tools to get inside my MacBook Pro, not to mention an external enclosure for my current drive. At that point, I’d be looking at around $200 anyway. So I looked elsewhere, hoping to find another reputable hardware retailer.
Being a Mac user, I decided to look at OWC, or Other World Computing. The store is heavily Mac-focused, as proven by its domain macsales.com. I’ve dealt with the retailer before – it’s where I bought the RAM upgrade for my Mac mini server – and have had no problems with its products. As I looked through its SSD products, I also found that their relatively cheap prices translated to DIY bundles that included an external enclosure and tools with which to open the bottom part of my MacBook Pro’s case.
Since I have had no problems with the RAM in my Mac mini, and since the prices were perfect for me, I decided to put in an order for a 120GB Mercury Electra 6G drive from OWC. It took just $144.99 out of my pocket, but it will add some much-needed performance in my current laptop.
The way I look at it is this: I spent $144.99 now so I can spend more on a great laptop later. I hate wasting money when I can just wait for something better to come along, so I’m sure I’ll be incredibly happy with my purchase. I’ve read plenty of stories about people using SSDs to prolong their computers’ lives, the exact thing that my Mac needs right now: a new lease on life.
And, when it’s finally time for my old hunk of aluminum and glass to produce its last startup chime, I will be able to take out this SSD and put it into whatever it is that I end up buying – with the exception of the Retina MacBook Pro, of course, but I doubt that’s where I’m headed anyway.
But hopefully that won’t be for a while. The SSD promises much faster boot and wake times, as well as general speed increases. Plus SSDs have no moving parts, meaning that I will have a lesser chance of ever ruining my performance than I do now with a traditional moving platter. Now that I think of it, my hard drive is probably dying due to my killing it. Oops.
Anyway, I plan on keeping it going for at least a year before I make the switch to a new machine. Hopefully by then Intel’s Haswell architecture will be out and I won’t have to worry about getting into the new processor game late.
When my drive arrives and I have the time to install it, I’ll come back and detail my experiences. Was the price worth it? Should I have taken that money and put it towards something better? Those questions will be answered once I’ve had a little time to experience the joys and horrors of SSD ownership.
In the meantime, leave a comment below if you’ve ever owned an SSD. How did/do you like it?
A decent SSD is easily the best bang-for-the-buck performance upgrade you can get. Hard drives are the single biggest performance bottleneck in a modern PC, mostly due to read/write latency. Even cheap SSDs that might not have the best max transfer rates offer access latencies several orders of magnitude faster than a conventional hard drive, so all those little reads and writes that that can really bog down a HDD are nothing to an SSD.
Exactly. I’m quite excited to see what kind of speeds I’ll get with this new SSD. I currently get ~50MB/s for both read and write currently. Hopefully it will be a fair amount faster.
Those are sequential speeds tho, and while a SSD can be up to 10x faster at sequential transfers (probably more like 6x in your case since you’rebottlenecked by the SATA interface), that’s not really what you’re gonna notice most. The above poster was alluding to seek time, which is usually around 9-11ms on a hard drive and non-existent on a SSD (<0.1ms). This plays into small random read/write operations, which is actually the bulk of what you (and the OS) do as you open apps and go about your daily routine. SSD can achieve even more than a 10x jump over HDD when it comes to random transfer speeds, it's more like 100x in some cases. Those numbers just aren't as sexy or as easy to explain in advertisement material, but that's a SSD's true strength, particularly as an OS drive.
“There were plenty of great options, of course, but they were usually around $150 and would mean that I would have to buy some additional tools to get inside my MacBook Pro”
You cant get in with a regular set of screw drivers?
The outer casing of the MacBook Pro needs a Phillips #00, but it also needs a Torx T6 and T8 for the insides. I know I have the Phillips one, but I’m not so sure about the Torx screwdrivers. The set also comes with a Straight Blade 1.8mm and a nylon spudger, as well as an external enclosure for my existing hard drive. And it was as expensive as some other models I was looking at, so I thought I might as well get more for my money.
That’s not a bad deal, but not a great one either. The Samsung 830 is often $90 for 128GB… An external enclosure and some tools wouldn’t cost more than the $60 difference, although it’d probably cost at least $30-40 so it’s not like you over paid by much. Apple is using drives with the Samsung 830′s controller in current Macs (alongside with a Toshiba depending on your luck, they always use two providers). The Sandforce controller in the drive you got had some compatibility issues thru the last year but I think they’ve all been ironed out by now, it’s actually one of the better after market drives to use on a Mac (alongside the 830) because it retains it’s performance pretty well without TRIM which Mac OS won’t enable for DIY upgrades unless you force it maximally thru a hack). The built in garbage collection isn’t as effective as TRIM at sustaining performance, but it’s better than most drive’s GC which can be backed into a scenario of extremely poor performance thru certain fringe usage cases. SF drives are also amongst the fastest as long as you aren’t dealing with compressed media, speed suffers if you’re dealing with compressed video and whatnot because of the compression algorithm it uses to boost performance… That won’t really matter much unless you’re transferring from an equally fast source, which won’t be the case for you without USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt devices. I wouldn’t be so sure about being able to use it on a future laptop tho, even full size models are getting more and more integrated. The Retina MBP for instance doesn’t use 2.5″ drives, it uses the same stick drives that the Air and ultrabooks use (and there’s no standard connector for those yet). By the time you upgrade the laptop you’ll probably be able to buy 256GB drives for what you paid now anyway. SSD are awesome upgrades for old rigs tho, next to RAM it’s easily the best bang for your buck. I’d dare say that your laptop will actually feel faster than any current gen i5/i7 laptop with a regular HDD, at least while performing every day tasks that aren’t very demanding. I jumped on the SSD bandwagon early and I haven’t regretted it for a minute. Bought an 80GB Intel X25-M for $220 over two years ago (desktop), then a 40GB X25-V for like $110 (netbook), last year I upgraded my desktop to a Samsung 830 (120GB for $160 in November) and moved the 80GB to my patent’s Core 2 Quad desktop. That SSD upgrade will easily allow them to continue using that desktop for another 5 years at least.
P.S. Can we please get a fix for the lack of line returns (enter) on Pocketables comments? That and the nesting suck, big time.
Since I’m leaning towards a gaming laptop for next year, I hope that I’ll be able to use this current drive in that later. Still, it won’t be a total loss if not: I am also thinking about building a rig at some point in the future, and this would be perfect for that computer, too.
And we’re looking into a fix for comment paragraph breaks! It’s annoying for us, too.
Great to hear. If nothing else, you can always dump it into an external case too and use it as a super fast portable USB 3.0 drive. I’m probably doing that with my 40GB soon, it’s just large enough to offload photos to during a trip.