SSD goodness

I launched this tech blog last fall, but only now am I getting around to posting something geeky.  With my doctoral work completed, I'll have more time to write here about favorite apps and gadgets.  My MacBook Pro being more than a year old and beginning to show some signs of general sluggishness, I decided it was time do to a "nuke and pave" of the operating system, in advance of the Yosemite release this fall.  I also decided that if I was going to go to the trouble of reinstalling Mavericks, I would upgrade my system by adding a Solid State hard drive.  I've wanted to do this for some time, but the price points on SSDs have been prohibitive.  Then I read of review of OWC's Mercury Electra drives, and decided that the quality and cost were just right.  Furthermore, OWC sells a great "Data Doubler" expansion kit for removing your SuperDrive DVD slot -- which I rarely use -- and using that space for a second internal hard drive.  I was in.  I settled on a 240gb SSD drive, because the price was low enough to make me jump on it but the storage was big enough that I could run OS X, all my apps, docs, and iTunes data on the new drive.  I chose the 6g version, since my 2013 MacBook Pro supports the faster throughput.

Upon arrival, the SuperDrive removed easily and the new drive in the expansion kit dropped into place without too much hassle. Pay attention to all those tiny screws! The innards of my MacBook Pro differed slightly from what was described in the OWC instructions, but I was able to adapt them and follow along without too much trouble. Everything booted up just fine after the 20 minute install, and I spent a few hours one (enjoyable) evening installing Mavericks and my personal data onto the new SSD, while reformatting and partitioning my factory spindle hard drive for use as one-part local Time Machine backup drive and one-part media storage drive.  The latter is for holding all those bulky movie and image files.  Keeping those bigger media files off of my SSD will help preserve my precious 240gb of operating space.  As for Time Machine, on the other partition, I have mostly used TM over the years for restoring particular deleted or changed files, never for recovering an entire Mac.  I make external clone copies for that.  So having an onboard TM backup is a nice new feature, to recover certain bits of data as needed.  Once I had everything reinstalled and tweaked to my liking, I quickly discovered the biggest payoff on the new SSD: speed.  I am stunned at how quickly my Mac  Pro boots up, as well as how much snappier the whole OS feels during use.  What's more, the machine is now very quiet, no longer spinning my factory hard drive with every new action.  I am a certified SSD convert. If you have a MacBook Pro with a traditional hard drive, I highly recommend an SSD upgrade.  Enjoy some SSD goodness.