Filed under: Hardware, How-tos, TUAW Tips, MacBook
TUAW Tip: Swap out your laptop's hard disk for a spiffy new SSD
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.
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