Solid state revolution: in-depth on how SSDs really work

SSDs use a huge grab bag of techniques to make a computer feel "snappy."

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[mbmcavoy]

I have a 2010 Mac Mini that was painfully slow with an increasing workload. We have massive iTunes and photo libraries, moved from iPhoto to Aperture, and my wife is more frequently shooting RAW and editing in Pixelmator. She would spend most of her time looking at the beach ball...

A couple months ago, I replaced the internal drive with a 128GB SSD, and also bumped the RAM from 2GB to 8GB while I was in there. (Our media already was on an external FW800 drive.) This far exceedes expectations! Nothing slows down the user experience anymore; even running disk-intensive processes that peg the CPU to 100% for minutes on end, the machine remains as snappy as when idle.

Since then, the drive in our old MacBook failed. I really wanted to put in an SSD. Unfortunately, 128GB would be a squeeze, 256GB way too expensive to justify, and the old drive that came out of the Mini was free. (sigh...)

 

[mbmcavoy]

I was expecting a spectacular improvement everybody said when trying SSD the first time. I got a barely noticeable improvement. The boot time is increased by 7 seconds (22s -> 15s). When using the machine, the operation seems to be a little bit faster. But nothing earth shattering. Is it because the CPU AMD C60 is too weak so that the Disk I/O improvement can not show its full potential?

Personally, I would consider a 30% reduction of boot time to be quite noticable, although perhaps a bit less than typical. Booting an OS is both I/O and CPU intensive, so I would expect that the CPU is a limiting factor.

How do you use your machine? Tasks that are not significantly limited by disk I/O will not be changed. Web browsing is generally dominated by internet connection speed. Playing media doesn't require speed. Productivity apps (MS Office, etc.) are usually limited by how fast you can type. Converting a video is all processor. Games shouldn't be waiting on the drive very frequently. An SSD won't make these go faster.

However, if you frequently launch large applications, switch between many open apps, switch users, or use apps that access many files (Software IDEs, photo managers, etc), an SSD should make these actions "snappy", eliminating all the annoying little waits while the computer catches up with you.

I mentioned above how I didn't go for an SSD when replacing a failed drive in our old MacBook. This computer is pretty much just used for web and email anymore; it already wakes quickly and doesn't get rebooted often. Since I already had a servicable HDD on hand, it wasn't worth the money...