Finally got an Intel SSD. Ended up going with the 80GB because I didn’t want to get totally ripped off, considering they will probably be much cheaper next year. It really makes a world of difference in startup/shutdown, app loading and overall OS performance. I will never be able to return to a magnetic disk. Check out these benchmarks from Xbench:
Before: Disk Test 25.12
Sequential 35.71
Uncached Write 62.98 38.67 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 40.53 22.93 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 32.47 9.50 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 24.59 12.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 19.38
Uncached Write 7.74 0.82 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 38.45 12.31 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 27.87 0.20 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 64.86 12.04 MB/sec [256K blocks]
After: Disk Test 249.92
Sequential 160.48
Uncached Write 132.43 81.31 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 130.05 73.58 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 137.63 40.28 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 413.30 207.72 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 564.64
Uncached Write 666.21 70.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 250.09 80.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1815.24 12.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 967.47 179.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Wow!!
So as to not completely hamstring my MacBook Pro with such limited storage, I decided to retain the original 320GB drive and put the SSD in an MCE OptiBay! Not a cheap solution but I’m thrilled with the setup. I do experience less battery life but it seems less than 10% worse and the performance improvement more than makes up for it.
