For the past few months, Tim has been trying to get me to upgrade my Hard Drive to a Solid State Hard drive.  I’ve resisted only because I need the storage for all my photos/videos and SSD’s of that size cost around $1000+.  I found a work around with the MCE Optibay, which allows you to replace your DVD drive in your Macbook Pro for an additional hard drive.  So now I could buy a 60 GB SSD and run my OS off of it and still have my 500 GB drive for storage of my Users folder.  I got both the SSD and the Optibay in yesterday and proceded to make the switch.  After I got everything up and running, the results were pretty amazing.

Boot time went from 44 seconds to 38 seconds.  Opening 5 programs at 1 time went from 36 second to 5 seconds.  Opening Aperture 3 went from 28 seconds to 14 seconds.  I’m not sure why boot times didn’t have a huge impact but the major difference is the time in loading applications.  I used to never auto-load apps at login because it’d take so long.  But now I have 5 apps that open at login and it takes about 4 seconds.  Aperture 3 has a much faster response time while editing as well.

As for the DVD drive, they also shipped me a USB enclosure to put my drive in so I can use it when I really need to.  I’ve also enabled Remote Disc on my Macbook Pro so I can use my work iMac to load CDs/DVDs if I need to at work.

So at this point in time, I don’t think SSDs are for everyone.  If you have a laptop and need the storage space and the optical drive, SSDs are still too expensive to replace your one system drive.  I am really looking forward to the future where I can run everything off one SSD and not have to have a separate spinning hard drive for the storage of my user data.  I think it’ll be a few more years til the price of flash memory comes down enough for mainstream adoption to occur.  But if you’re a power user and you want a faster computer, a SSD is probably the best upgrade money can buy at this point in time.