SSDs, or solid-state drives, are all the rage in portables these days. They come in MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs directly from Apple (with the appropriate upgrades, of course), and we've seen people upgrade their old-school mechanical drives, hack in a second drive to take advantage of the speed of a shiny new SSD, oreven put one in an AppleTV.

Desktop computers are usually left out of the solid-state love-fest. After all, 3.5" drives are usually less expensive than a 2.5" drive of a similar capacity, and desktop machines are less prone to damage to the disk since they are usually stationary when running.

However, there are times when a solid-state upgrade to a desktop machine makes sense. For Jason Siebert, this was one of those times. When the drive on his 24" iMac started showing the tell-tale signs of a drive on the brink of death, he decided to tear the machine apart and throw in a smaller & faster SSD, and use his Drobo for external storage. Installation was simple for the most part, but some adjustments had to be made to allow for installing a 2.5" drive in the space of a 3.5" drive, and some finagling of the drive due to a too-short SATA cable.

The result is a pretty satisfying speed increase when it comes to opening up applications, and especially when running a virtual machine. Check out the installation instructions and first impressions on Jason's website.

Any upgrades like this should be performed only by skilled users, and of course it may will void your warranty. Proceed at your own risk.

A few weeks ago, we ran a short post about the release of OWC's Mercury On-The-Go Solid-State Drives. The drives, which come in the same miniscule transparent drive enclosures used by OWC for the rest of the bus-powered drive line, use SSD technology to provide users with more shock resistance and higher read speeds than traditional "spinning platter" hard drives.

OWC provided a demo unit for TUAW to try out, and I had an opportunity to use the drive in both day-to-day Time Machine backup work and for backing up some large video files. While the drives, which come in 64 GB, 128 GB, and 256 GB sizes, are more expensive than their hard drive counterparts, they do offer benefits that may be critical for some users.

Need more hard drive space in your MacBook Pro? Well, if you're not scared to get your hands dirty with a little hacking, and not too attached to your DVD drive, you can hack your way to twice the hard drives.

This particular user faced a dilemma when purchasing his new MacBook Pro: get the faster SSD hard drive or the larger capacity rotational drive. Instead of settling on either of those options, he removed his DVD drive, hacked together an adapter to interface with the proprietary Apple connector, and installed a second hard drive. The result is a "best of both worlds" scenario for him; a faster boot time and responsiveness, and plenty of space available for movies and music.

He posted several pictures and instructions if you're ready to take the plunge into a dual-hard-drive notebook. There is some harsh language in the post, so you may not want to open this at work.

Any hacks like this should be performed only by skilled users. This will void your warranty, folks, so proceed at your own risk.

[via Hack A Day]

If you're looking for a significant performance boost for your middle-aged laptop, replacing your aging hard disk with a solid state disk (SSD) could give your computer a new lease on life.

Solid-state disks (pictured, bottom) differ from traditional hard disks (top) in that they're not constructed with platters and heads. Instead, they're more like giant thumb drives, containing memory chips designed to be written and re-written without wearing out. The upside to this is that SSDs are much, much faster to read and write to, making booting and starting applications lightning-quick.

I recently installed an Intel X25-M SSD, a 160GB drive, as a replacement for a 120GB Toshiba hard disk for my 2006-vintage black MacBook. Spendy, for sure, but for the performance increase and the extra life it adds to my MacBook, well worth it. Plus, I had my state tax refund burning a hole in my pocket.

The performance is phenomenal. The old disk booted in a respectable one minute, 49 seconds. The new disk booted in a blazing 31 seconds. Ridiculous. Windows also boots in less than half the time it took before. Photoshop CS3 launches in five seconds, Illustrator CS3 in nine seconds.

Getting the drive was simple: It's moving the data that takes time. Read on to see how you can migrate your data like I did -- including a Boot Camp partition -- with little fuss.

It looks like Apple has a nice little surprise for anybody in the market for the SSD equipped MacBook Air. The price on the Apple Store for the 64GB SSD upgrade on the 1.6GHz Air has dropped to $599 from $999. Similarly the price of the 1.8GHz Air (equipped with the SSD standard) has dropped to $2598 from $3098.

Needless to say, the SSD is still a pretty penny and there's some controversy about how much it helps battery life. But if you've been waiting for one it looks like this is your lucky day.

Thanks, Keisha!

In an interesting test by the folks over at Tom's Hardware, solid-state drives (SSDs) suck more power than their platter-based counterparts. Why should you care? Because the MacBook Air features an SSD in its higher-end configurations.

Tom's looked at four different SSD models, and compared them with a 7,200 RPM disk of the same size. One disk, from Crucial, touted its "low power consumption" in marketing materials. However, the disk reduced its test laptop's battery runtime from seven hours to six hours. Ouch.

SSDs are significantly faster, of course, but the idea that they consume less power appears to be false. As manufacturers develop thinner and thinner sub-notebooks, power consumption can only become more and more important.

Update: Many commenters are pointing out problems with how Tom's Hardware conducted the test. Peter cites a comment from our sister blog Engadget that says "The TH article was, as usual, significantly flawed. The benchmark they used to test battery life restarts itself after each completion, doing so until the battery is dead. However, the article did not report how many times the benchmark was able to run on the SSD vs. the mechanical HD." Commenter Greg recommended this Anandtech article as a counterpoint to this one.

It's June, you're bored, and you're looking at that 40GB AppleTV sitting on your media center. The next thing you know, you've bought a solid-state drive (SSD) and created the world's first (as far as we know) SSD-equipped Apple TV.

Josh Lee modded his original AppleTV not to increase the size of the drive -- he's using a 32GB Transcend SSD since he stores most of his media on NAS -- or speed it up. In fact, it sounds like he did the mod just for the hell of it. The benefits of the mod include less heat generation by the AppleTV and almost silent operation.

Josh reports in his email to AppleTVHacks that all he had to do was take an image of his AppleTV drive, mount it, resize the media partition, DD the image to the SSD , do a factory restore, use the patch2stick, and the SSD was quickly up and running. Whew!

Your challenge, TUAW reader, is to nab one of those fast 256GB Samsung SSD's when they ship this fall and use the Josh Lee method to create a fast, cool, and silent FrankenAppleTV. If you're the first, tell us about it.

A big thank you to Luck for the pointer to AppleTVHacks

MacBook / MacBook Pro owners, are you suffering from SSD envy?

There's no need to fret, since ExperCom has just announced immediate availability of SSD upgrades for your favorite Apple laptops. If you already own a MacBook or MacBook Pro, you can send it to ExperCom's Logan, Utah office and have your hard drive replaced with a 60GB ($599) or 120GB ($899) SSD. ExperCom moves your data to the SSD so your MacBook is ready to roll when it is back in your hands, and returns the old HD to you for use as a Time Machine drive (enclosure not included).

If you've been thinking about purchasing a new MacBook Pro or MacBook, ExperCom is selling those laptops pre-configured with SSDs. A 15" MacBook Pro with the 2.4 GHz processor and a 120GB SSD is $2649, compared to $1999 for a stock Apple MBP with a standard 200GB hard drive. Want a white MacBook with a 2.2 GHz CPU and a 60GB SSD? It's yours for $1649, $550 over the price of a white MacBook with a 120GB HD.

Since the SSD upgrades are not covered by Apple's warranty, ExperCom provides service or can re-install the old drive prior to Apple service.

Thanks to Eric Hancock for the tip!

Yesterday was Memorial Day in the US, a Bank Holiday in the UK, and apparently big honkin' solid-state drive (SSD) day in South Korea.

Samsung, which provides the 64GB SSD drive that is available in a pricey configure-to-order version of the MacBook Air, announced a 256GB 2.5-inch SSD drive. While the 64GB model in the MacBook Air has been criticized for having leisurely performance, the new MLC (Multi-Level Cell) flash SATA II drive boasts 200MBps read and 160MBps sequential write speeds. Those are double the speeds of the 64GB drive.

The new model features power consumption that is slightly less than that of the 64GB drive (.9 watt in active mode, compared to 1.0 watt), as well as sophisticated data encryption.

There's no word on whether or not the new drive will show up in future MacBook Air models. The monster SSD will be widely available in September, with a 1.8-inch version expected in the 4th quarter of 2008. Does a faster, bigger, and hopefully cheaper SSD-based MacBook Air sound like something we can expect to hear Steve mention as "one more thing" at Macworld Expo 2009?

The solid-state-drive and the MacBook Air. 64 GB of goodness and no moving parts. You know you want it; fast, quiet, cool, power-saving and simply the finest laptop money can buy -- plus, you can shave with the front end, or slice cucumbers. One minor note, however, for those who measure their tax refunds in the thousands instead of the tens or hundreds of thousands: this prime bit of kit will take a huge bite out of your bankroll.

How huge? Check the Apple Store (and marvel that the number wasn't mentioned specifically in the keynote except to say "pricey") -- a whopping $3100 for the new hotness. Sure, it may be worth every penny, but first you have to find all those pennies and herd them into a recognizable grouping of some sort.

Would the SSD MBA be worth it to you? Extra points if you don't have an actual M.B.A. graduate degree and you can still afford one.

Thanks Rich