I just installed a new boot drive in my Mac Pro, a OCZ Vertex 120MB SSD drive.
Oh boy how that made a difference. The computer just became so snappy now. Startup, login and application startup is so much faster, and I don’t have to listen to that harddisk sound all the time. I still have ordinary drives for my image files and all the other data I store, as well as for the TimeMachine drives, but the system and applications are on the SSD drive. Below is a table of different operations using the new and the old drive. And by the way, the old boot drive was the standard 320GB drive that came with the computer. It’s a Western Digital 7200rpm drive.
| Operation | WD 320GB | OCZ 120GB |
| Start from pressing button to the login dialog show up | 38sec | 25sec |
| From entering password until the desktop is completed | 8sec | 3sec |
| Launch Photoshop | 18sec | 5sec |
| Launch Firefox | 4sec | 1sec |
| Launch Safari | 2sec | <1sec |
| Launch LightRoom | 15sec | 9sec |
| Launch iTunes | 6sec | 2sec |
| Launch Mail | 4sec | 1sec |
This is not a very accurate or scientific test. I only did it once for each drive, and it is kind of difficult to determine when some operations are finished, but it gives an indication of how it went.
The subjective impression is that things suddenly happens instantly. The icons in the dock hardly gets to bounce when an application is launched. All this joy is of course a result of the close to zero access time on these disks. There is no speedup on cpu intensive operations, like LightRoom development operations or Photoshop work, but all the small daily tasks suddenly became much more enjoyable.
Just a note on the OCZ drive. The Vertix has got some very good reviews, but don’t mix it up with the Apex model. Even if the Apex drive seems to give faster read and write speed, the controller circuit does not handle large amounts of small files very well. The performance drop in such cases are dramatic. The Vertex has a different controller with a cache, which handles this very well.
