Finally I upgraded my Mid 2010 MacBook Pro with a nice Crucial m4 SSD with 512GB. I was thinking about changing my hard drive for month but now the price dropped from 600 to 400 EUR and I went for it.
It took a little while to collect relevant informations so I want to share a workflow:
- Backup your complete system with time machine!
- Swap your drives (ifixit.com) without touching your battery.
- Check if your SSD runs the newest firmware and upgrade if necessary.
- Boot from your OS X Lion recovery partition (hold ALT key on Mac startup).
- Use the disk utility to restore from time machine.
- Go outside or hang out with friends or family!
- Enable trim support in OS X Lion for your SSD.
Done.
Since a couple of days it really makes fun using my MacBook Pro again. It dropped packaging time for a 1,5 GB big IPA file with ADT from 12 to almost 6 minutes. This is a huge benefit, so if you’re still using normal HDDs for daily work I recommend switching to SSD as soon as possible!
UPDATE – added xbench results:
| Name | Score | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| System Info | ||
| Xbench Version | 1.3 | |
| System Version | 10.7.4 (11E53) | |
| Physical RAM | 8192 MB | |
| Model | MacBookPro6,2 | |
| Drive Type | M4-CT512M4SSD2 | |
| Disk Test | 409.65 | |
| Sequential | 253.88 | |
| Uncached Write | 405.78 | 249.14 MB/sec [4K blocks] |
| Uncached Write | 324.52 | 183.61 MB/sec [256K blocks] |
| Uncached Read | 128.80 | 37.69 MB/sec [4K blocks] |
| Uncached Read | 408.86 | 205.49 MB/sec [256K blocks] |
| Random | 1060.10 | |
| Uncached Write | 1452.92 | 153.81 MB/sec [4K blocks] |
| Uncached Write | 608.33 | 194.75 MB/sec [256K blocks] |
| Uncached Read | 2231.07 | 15.81 MB/sec [4K blocks] |
| Uncached Read | 1007.15 | 186.88 MB/sec [256K blocks] |
Restored Time Machine backups are seldom my friend…why not just clone the HD with CCC in half the time and be done.