Ghost in the Machine

My MacBook Pro 3,1 (non-unibody) died a couple months ago and I replaced it with one of these fancy new SSDs. I had low expectations, but have been blown away since. If you’re thinking about getting an SSD — just do it.

Below are the benchmarks from xbench. Note that my MacBook Pro doesn’t have a newer Sata interface, so your performance will likely be higher.

Results 184.94
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.6 (9G55)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookPro3,1
Drive Type OCZ-VERTEX 1199
Disk Test 184.94
Sequential 140.15
Uncached Write 217.65 133.63 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 187.94 106.33 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 69.09 20.22 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 240.85 121.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 271.83
Uncached Write 109.47 11.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 309.98 99.24 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1776.55 12.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 558.10 103.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]

I happened to be able to get a couple of the new Seagate Momentus 2.5″ 7200rpm 320GB laptop hard drives from PC Connection.

After a 20-minute upgrade following these instructions for replacing a MacBook Pro hard drive I ran xbench and below are the results, in case anyone cares.

A couple of tips:

• Don’t get the drives with G-shock if you’re an MBPro user
• No, there shouldn’t be any jumpers set on the drive.