Since about the beginning of 2009, I have been considering an SSD (solid state drive) to replace the internal drive on my first generation Unibody 2.4 15″ MacBook Pro (the one with the express card slot). At a price point approaching $500 for 160GB, I remained on the side lines waiting for a price drop that really never came.
About mid-year i purchased a Aluratek Filemate 48 GB Solid State Disk ExpressCard (at the time, it was called SolidGo Filemate…same product) through Amazon for a mere $140. I migrated my applications and operating system 10.6 to the Filmate and used that as my boot drive. My User folder still remained on the internal 2.5 SATA drive. This actually worked fabulously well and really improved my OS boot time and application load times. The downside was that I had been using drive cloning software (SuperDuper) as backup and now my OS and Apps were not backing up to the same image.
Having been spoiled by this foray into the realm of SSD I decided to splurge this December and purchase an Intel X-25M G2 160GB drive from Amazon for $479. My basis for purchase came almost exclusively from AnnandTech.com and the article “The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD”. Since installing the SSD and trimming down my data to accommodate the smaller drive size, I have been very impressed. Launch times of applications are almost instantaneous and it’s like I have a brand new machine with an extremely fast processor. All in all, a worthy upgrade even at a $500 price point if efficiency and speed help your business run.
