Made your way into your local Apple Store recently? If you’re like me, you may have gone in and found the new MacBook Air‘s to be mind-blowingly fast. With a seemingly underpowered 1.4ghz processor, the 11-inch Air seemed to tackle a pretty substantial load during my brief encounter, and with only 2gb of RAM. As […]
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Moving out of the Dark Ages and into SSD

Dec 13th 2010 by

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Made your way into your local Apple Store recently? If you’re like me, you may have gone in and found the new MacBook Air‘s to be mind-blowingly fast. With a seemingly underpowered 1.4ghz processor, the 11-inch Air seemed to tackle a pretty substantial load during my brief encounter, and with only 2gb of RAM. As my heart raced while opening as many applications and tabs in Safari, I could feel the all too familiar “reality distortion field” setting in and by the time I left I knew I would soon be ditching my “old” 2.4 GHZ MacBook Pro Unibody.

Then as a few days set in, I began to seriously weigh out the pro’s and cons of potentially replacing my existing machine with a MacBook Air. What about that Air made it so fast? Well it should be obvious by now (even if you didn’t notice the title of this article) that one of the biggest advantages of the newest line from Cupertino is the Solid State Hard Drive aka SSD.

SSD’s are certainly not brand new to the market. The price, however is considerably more, especially when in comparison to their SATA brethren. For comparison, a 120GB SATA drive could potentially be found for under $50 at your favorite online retailer such as Newegg, while a 120GB SSD can run you well over $300. SSD drives come from a variety of manufacturers. iSource is lucky to have two SSD’s from Mushkin and OCZ to test for this article. We will be scoring benchmarks using both iBench and SpeedTools Pro before and after the initial installation, as well as reporting the differences between the two SSD’s.
One key obstacle is still extremely important, especially for power users: managing space. This may sound easy at first, but remember, switching to an SSD is going to require you to downgrade in most cases your existing storage capacity. And there are many good tips and tricks in OSX we can use as we go that will help us optimize our oh-so valuable disk space.

But what if you can’t sacrifice the space for the speed? No worries. We will also show you a great mod from the guys at MCE using one of their Optibay drives to give us even more room. And plus, you use that SuperDrive like what, once a year? So stay tuned for Wednesday’s article where we’ll discuss installation and disk optimization.

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