After reviewing Apple's latest MacBook Pro I noticed something very interesting: its performance versus my two-year-old model felt far more significant than the 15-30 percent CPU speed improvement suggested I would observe. It booted in seconds; it would copy massive files in the blink of an eye; I could duplicate galleries of RAW images in Aperture between sips of coffee. It wasn't because of the improvements to Intel's CPUs, as one might expect; it was because of the SSD on the inside.
Tech-minded individuals have known for years that SSDs are to regular hard drives what an Audi R8 is to a pony. But traditionally that has also been true in terms of price, not just speedy performance. After the huge benefits I observed in Apple's latest MBP compared to my still very capable 2011 model (quad-core 2.7GHz Core i7, 16GB DDR3 RAM, AMD Radeon HD 6770M graphics) I decided to see how much a terabyte of SSD storage cost. I was pleasantly surprised to see Amazon was listing Crucial's 960GB M500 SSD (a 2.5-inch drive that fits laptops) for over 30 percent off (it still is), meaning it could be bought for £400.
That's still expensive to say the least (the same capacity for a regular hard drive can be as low as fifty quid), but considering I was tempted to drop two grand on Apple's new MacBook Pro I thought it would be at least worth seeing what difference to performance Crucial's SSD would make.
It turns out to be a lot.
I backed up my Mac to Time Machine, then restored the operating system to the SSD. This meant I could compare like-for-like, as the transfer would copy over my massive libraries, redundant files that clog up space -- all the crap that can typically slow a computer down a little would also carry over.
The first thing I noticed is that boot times dropped from well over a minute to a matter of seconds. Additionally, once the machine had booted into a usable state, background applications had also loaded, which meant I could begin working immediately.
Secondly, I noticed my work rendering video files and RAW images in Aperture no longer caused "spinning beachballs" that typically would drive an axe through my workflow. I could once again effectively multitask even while asking the machine to crunch huge amounts of data.
A third, and entirely unexpected, benefit was within Mail. My Mail archive includes every sent and received email since I moved full-time to OS X in 2008. I do this so I can search old contacts I've had one-off correspondence with. Suddenly those searches would deliver results in real-time as I typed words into Mail's search box. This used to take a few seconds, but now results were appearing instantly.
Applications that had begun to take some time to load, such as Adobe Photoshop, began loading within two "bounces" of the application in the OS X Dock (about two seconds). Finally, in terms of pure numbers I was pleased to see I could duplicate a 700mb video file in under four seconds.
Also worth mentioning: SSDs are silent. My machine suddenly ran as quietly as a MacBook Air unless I was hammering the CPU and that caused cooling fans to speed up.
This is all very anecdotal of course, and far from a scientific test. But the difference an SSD made has been astounding. It sent a very clear message to me that in the present market of high-end laptops, you may find that performance to your machine can be improved much more noticeably by switching to an SSD than by buying a brand new machine (unless of course than machine also includes an SSD).
Capacities vary up to 960GB in Crucial's M500 range, as tested here, and can be bought with capacities as low as 120GB for about £70 (at the time of writing) on Amazon. Samsung also makes a 120GB model for the same price, and Corsair's memory has always been high-performing in my testing, and it makes some well-priced SSD options too.
If you're finding your workflow is being affected by long boot times, lengthy waits for applications to load or files to duplicate, I would recommend checking out an SSD. Prices are still noticeably higher than regular hard drives, but the performance benefits are there for those who value speed over value when it comes to computing.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
