Making your laptop really really fast with an SSD drive.

Since I sold my pimped up EeePC and my new Acer Aspire One doesn't take 2.5" drives, I just had to subject my Macbook Pro to a cruel experiment with the left-over solid state drive (SSD) from my netbook.

Sadly it's only 32GB in capacity. Hardly enough for the OS and the applications, let alone my user profile and all my movies and music. But even 32GB had set me back about 150 euros (about $300 Aus).

With some help from the Twitterer @HiryuSingh I figured out how use this expensive little spare-part. His suggestion was to move the user-folder to an external disk.

The option to do this is hidden behind several grave warning in the "Accounts" settings in the "System Preferences"...

... after right clicking on a user and choosing the "Advanced options".

Since this was a fresh install on my SSD harddrive I made new user called "woolly" for myself and I changed the Home Directory of that user to another harddisk named "Machintosh Home".

I had to manually copy the home directory to that drive before I could log in to that account, so you can't do this trick when you're logged in as the user you are trying to move.

Of course an external disk is always going to be slower than an internal one and I wanted to be sure that I was actually improving things.

USB is the slowest option of all and I would not recommend it all for this purpose. It only showed transfer speeds of around 30MBps.

        Drive Type        Freecom Mobile Drive XXS
    Disk Test    29.47   
        Sequential    35.58   
            Uncached Write    39.76    24.41 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    55.37    31.33 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    18.36    5.37 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    67.75    34.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random    25.15   
            Uncached Write    8.33    0.88 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    90.37    28.93 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    61.62    0.44 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    85.55    15.87 MB/sec [256K blocks]

My second choice was an external Firewire 800 drive, which managed about 50MBps.

        Drive Type        LaCie Rugged FW/USB
    Disk Test    55.74   
        Sequential    78.49   
            Uncached Write    75.13    46.13 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    97.46    55.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    51.07    14.95 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    128.06    64.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random    43.22   
            Uncached Write    17.16    1.82 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    95.01    30.42 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    66.70    0.47 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    114.35    21.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]

In trying to get the most out of an external drive I also ordered a eSata housing and placed the Macbook's original harddisk in that. It also benchmarked at around 50MBps.

    Disk Test    53.84   
        Sequential    79.98   
            Uncached Write    85.62    52.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    85.59    48.42 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    54.44    15.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    120.80    60.71 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random    40.57   
            Uncached Write    16.54    1.75 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    63.37    20.29 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    71.63    0.51 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    119.08    22.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Firewire 800 is good enough then.

Now let's have a look at how the internal SSD drive performs:

Results    211.91   
    System Info       
        Xbench Version        1.3
        System Version        10.6 (10A411)
        Physical RAM        4096 MB
        Model        MacBookPro5,1
        Drive Type        OCZ-VERTEX v1.10
    Disk Test    211.91   
        Sequential    198.22   
            Uncached Write    224.62    137.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    215.29    121.81 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    123.89    36.26 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    332.11    166.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random    227.63   
            Uncached Write    78.47    8.31 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    339.87    108.80 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    1855.35    13.15 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    742.46    137.77 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Over 100MBps... say what? Helmsman, engage ridiculous speed!

Mac OS X boots within 10 seconds. Photoshop is ready within 3. Starting Firefox doesn't even leave enough time to blink.

Sure. My datafiles are on the external disk, but at 50MBps, that's still on par with an internal harddisk, which would push bits around at about 60 or 70MBps at best.

Would I recommend doing this yourself? No... not with a 32GB SSD. Wait until 64 or 128 becomes affordable. But I CAN wholeheartedly confirm that running your OS of an SSD drive is well worth it in regards to speed. I can certainly not get used to normal loading times again.