Ever since solid state drives became available to consumers I’ve wanted one. The concept of an SSD just made so much sense but at the time the capacity limitations and the cost to entry just didn’t make sense to plunge into. Lucky for me I waited since it would take years before the speed of SSD drives were offered at a level of the technologies original promise. Currently the leader is Intel with Samsung catching up very quickly.

With Intel recently dropping prices on their supposed screamingly fast X-25 models I made the plunge and purchased the Intel X25-M 160 GB SATA drive for my unibody MacBook from NewEgg. Much to my surprise the drive arrived the very next day. After unpacking it I hooked it up externally with a SATA to USB adapter and proceeded to partition it and subsequently clone my existing drive using SuperDuper. Once the data was copied over (a little over an hour) I swapped the internal drive with the Intel SSD one and powered it up.

Wow! It’s as if I have a whole new PC. The speed increase across the board is not just noticeable but very in your face. Applications launch instantly and boot up time is at least half of what it was before. It’s also very odd to be working on it and hearing absolutely nothing. It’s quite serene.

While the cost of these drives are still much higher than their mechanical counterparts, many will be turned away. But for power users who love speed and those cursed with having their hard drives conk out on them every few years (my hands is raised high), I think the price is definitely worth it.