It's real!
Well actually it wasn't totally superfluous. The week before vacation, my laptop's hard drive decided to suicide IN DATA STRUCTURES (when I booted the computer, it would try to install some random firmware update. :S), so I was left with a brick. Not fun. >:[ Well thankfully, I had a nice Time Machine backup, so I didn't worry that much. Anyway, I decided to install this little bugger immediately after I got back from my Boston vacation to see if my HDD was indeedly at fault. It turns out that it was and I now have a working laptop! In fact, I'm typing this entry on it :)
Here are some impressions (these are estimates; I was too lazy to use a stopwatch):
- Mac OS X Snow Leopard install from iPod takes about 10min vs. 20min for HDD
- Boots in 15s and shuts down in 5s. Dammnn!! O_O
- Sleep (includes writing RAM image to disk) takes about 3s instead of 10s.
- Projected battery life with WiFi enabled is now 4 hours (33% increase!!)
- Palm rest area above disk is no longer toasty after disk intensive operations
Here is some Xbench vomit for Mac geeks and benchmark junkies (performance relative to a ~6 year old Power Mac G5 with 7200RPM disk):
Disk Test 218.97
Sequential 139.23
Uncached Write 144.06 88.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 132.67 75.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 98.07 28.70 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 246.74 124.01 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 512.48
Uncached Write 593.22 62.80 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 252.59 80.86 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1921.97 13.62 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 609.71 113.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Some more system info (specs are pretty lame for 2009, but plenty usable!):
MacBook Pro 1,1 (Early 2006)
Intel Core Duo ``Yonah'' 2.0GHz 2MB 667MHz
2048MB DDR2 667MHz RAM
INTEL SSDSA2M160G2GC MLC 160GB
ATi Mobility Radeon X1600 (downclocked)
It increased my composite Xbench score from a ~50 to 115.87. This is pretty win.
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