DerekMartin.ca

How fast?

Here are a bunch of measurements I took by videoing the Mac, and then watching the frames in slow-motion in iMovie. All times are in seconds. Boot time to items in menu bar near clock HDD - 110 SSD - 58.5 (1.9x faster) iTunes time to launch with 220GB music HDD - 12.9 SSD - 4.7 (2.7x faster) Zend Studio time to launch & complete all progress bars (refreshing workspace, syncing svn cache, etc) HDD - 222.5 SSD - 44.5 (5x faster) I didn’t take the time to measure a bunch of other applications on the HDD, but I will give you some rough estimates. The SSD *really* shines: NetNewsWire with 191 feeds & 8000 unread items HDD - 10 SSD - 1 (10x faster) OmniFocus with 28 projects & tasks HDD - 15 SSD - 1 (15x faster) Mail with 2 accounts & 9 smart folders

HDD - 35

SSD - 1 (35x faster!)

I use Zend Studio all day every day. And it needs restarting quite a few times each day. At 222 seconds, multiple restarts sucked up a lot of time. Not only that, but waiting for the progress bars to complete throughout the day was torture. While I was waiting, I would get distracted, and my productivity would plummet. With the new SSD, it launches & completes progress bars 80% faster, making me 80% less likely to get distracted. I am SO excited to see how this effects not only my productivity, but my mental status throughtout the day. Waiting was frustrating, and now I’ll be doing a lot less of it.

P.S. - the SSD is rated at 3Gbps, but my MacBook only supports 1.5Gbps. So, next time I upgrade I’ll probably get another speed boost with this very same drive. Awesome.

Comments from my old blog:

(Casey)[http://www.downlifesroad.com] said: I’m planning on getting an SSD for my system, thanks for the post and the tweet that lead me here.

-C at 2010-09-10 15:03:34

u.c. said: No more tapping the fingers then.Sounds great! at 2010-08-20 06:28:45

(Chris Hartjes)[http://www.littlehart.net/atthekeyboard] said: What size drive did you buy? at 2010-08-26 14:44:35

(Derek)[http://www.derekmartin.ca] said: The HDD in my MacBook was 160GB, and a few times I came up against that with “disk full” issues, so I ponied up and went for the 240GB non-RAID version. So far, 100GB free :) Gonna buy an MCE OptiBay which will allow me to replace the SuperDrive with a 500GB Seagate Momentus Hybrid HDD/Flash drive. The OptiBay comes with an external USB enclosure for the SuperDrive, so I’ll still be able to use it. In the meantime, the Seagate will be able to hold all my files, MP3s, and photos (which already get backed up nightly to external drives). at 2010-08-26 17:21:22