With the advent of many of Macs moving to SSD (Solid State Drive), we thought it would be interesting to try an experiment to see what difference we saw by using a SSD-based system. To explain briefly, SSD storage is faster and more reliable (due primarily to a lack of moving parts) than the hard drives we’ve been using for the past few decades, but at this point, somewhat more expensive.

The system we looked at was a 2008 model MacBook, no longer a quick machine but it should be suitably powerful for a typical home user. Running Aperture 3, we were beginning to find that with an internal 7200rpm 500GB spinning hard drive (so, not the entry level hard drive that came wih this machine) and 4GB of RAM, that moving between photos in our library (which admittedly was getting large at 80Gb) was moving from sluggish to infuriatingly slow. Most other applications were running OK, typical things like Office and Safari were more than acceptable. But anything that required manipulation or searching of large amounts of data was slowing performance.

First off, we replaced the internal 500GB drive with a similarly sized SSD. We decided to try one of the slower SSD’s (price mainly), and the difference was phenomenal. Searching in Outlook was much snappier, browsing through our Aperture library almost instantaneous.

The next thing we tried was top replicate the existing machine on the lowest specification MacBook Air. So, now we had an SSD that was just about full to the brim, and just 2GB of RAM. And yet it performed better than the older MacBook. Obviously the Air had a better processor, faster memory etc etc, but the wow factor was this […]