I wrote about hybrid articles in two Tech Tails issues, and installed one in my MacBook Pro late last month. Installation is a cinch in any unibody MacBook or MacBook Pro, and is completely doable for anyone. Of course, you should ensure that you’re properly grounded and ESD compliant, and we won’t be held responsible if anything goes wrong!
After installing it, I used Disk Utility to clone my conventional drive to the hybrid drive. That process is detailed below in a separate article, and left me with an exact copy of my old hard drive. It took about an hour. After the clone was finished, I anxiously powered up the computer with the knowledge that any performance gain would probably take a while to materialize.
I was right that it’d take a while to see performance benefits of the new drive. If you recently bought a new Mac or performed an Erase and Install on your hard drive, you might have noticed that the first launches of any application will be substantially slower than subsequent launches. Mac OS X and your hard drive work together to make frequently executed actions faster, but they need time to learn just how they can do that.
The difference between the hybrid hard drives and all others is the size of the solid state cache the drive carries on board. 32 megabytes is traditional for most conventional drives, but the hybrid drive has 4 gigabytes, so the benefits are multiplied. It does take a little time.
Off the bat, I realized the new drive ran a bit warmer than the old drive. This didn’t concern me too much, knowing what I do from Google’s massive and influential study of the causes of hard drive failure. In fact, I wrote about it in 2007. This was, and remains, a small annoyance.
It took about a week for me to really notice speed gains. I didn’t do any statistically relevant testing before and after the swap, but I do know that programs launch faster than they used to, boot time is greatly reduced, and copying folders full of small files is faster. If only this drive could make my DSL faster! Not even more money can do that right now.
This drive is not faster than a traditional hard drive in copying large files. I keep a library of very large disk images on my computer and copy them to and from all the time. That’s not surprising, especially since these images are often eight to twenty gigabytes—far larger than the four gigabyte cache employed by the drive.
Battery life has not changed on my MacBook Pro.
This drive is an incredible value, and I recommend it heartily to everyone. It’s not going to be like putting your system folder in a RAM disk under OS 9 in terms of dramatic increases in battery life and overall system speed, but it’s an almost universally accessible upgrade that makes everyday tasks snappier. I can’t wait for solid state drives to come down in price so more of us can enjoy their myriad advantages. Just as a 500GB laptop drive cost $300 a few years ago, the days of $2 per gigabyte solid state storage are numbered.