this is the best on the market right now
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/250gb-samsu...-write-520 I6 WITH GAS CONVERSION
HST BODY KIT
OSRAM LED DRIVING FOGS
CARS LOOKING GOOOOD!

That Samsung is a great price but I've done some research and the Crucial one gets a good overall write up and more than enough for the home user. I would imagine it will make my existing HDD look awful.

http://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/macbook-pro-%.../CT5435416 LL.B (Hons) - University of Derby
LOT (Lord of Time) - University of Gallifrey

Do you know, I thought sod it, I'm having one! I deployed MasterCard and will sort the bill on payday. I'm in a good mood with the holiday almost here so I think this is a good long term investment.

Plumped for the crucial MX100 in the link above. I've also picked up a 16GB USB flash drive from Amazon for £5 which I can use to re-install OSX Mavericks as per the instruction video.

The combination of the SSD and the 2TB external hard drive means this will be like a brand new Mac only faster! My current boot time when tested yesterday was 1 minute 40 seconds  LL.B (Hons) - University of Derby
LOT (Lord of Time) - University of Gallifrey

We should get a sweepstake on. I say new boot time is 30 to 40 seconds I6 WITH GAS CONVERSION
HST BODY KIT
OSRAM LED DRIVING FOGS
CARS LOOKING GOOOOD!

^ Let's hope so

My current HDD is 319GB so I am losing some space but I would be nowhere near filling 256GB on the SSD anyway. The addition of the 2TB external drive means I've got shed loads of space for backup's and memory hungry files.

P.S, according to the disk tester app, my HDD is currently writing and reading at 74MB/s. Sometimes slower.  LL.B (Hons) - University of Derby
LOT (Lord of Time) - University of Gallifrey

Finally got this all sorted and installed and oh my god what a difference! Best investment I've made for my computer. The boot up time has dropped from 1 minute 40 seconds to 12 seconds

Everything opens very quickly indeed and I remembered to enable TRIM which is crucial for SSD's. I cannot recommend this enough. A brand new MacBook Pro with a HDD would not be anywhere near this quick. Disk tester showed the write time as hitting 330Mb/s and read time as 505Mb/s  LL.B (Hons) - University of Derby
LOT (Lord of Time) - University of Gallifrey

...

As predicted.

I installed an SSD in a Sony laptop I had a few years back. I would never go back to a traditional spinner...

... ...

Be true to yourself. That way happiness lies...

I bought an HP laptop with 2 x 750GB drives.

First thing I did was clone the primary drive to a 256GB SSD and swap it.

Windows 8.1 boot time now around 14 seconds. Steve

2008 TD4 HSE Auto, Zermatt Silver

My previous laptop ran Win 7 Pro. I swapped the HDD (approx 1m 30s to 2m boot time) for an SSD and the boot time went to 20 seconds.

I have a Sony Vaio Pro 13 / Win 8.1, with a PCIe SSD. Boot time 8 seconds to desktop

Pretty happy with that.

... ...

Be true to yourself. That way happiness lies...

Latest MacBook Air, from cold to desktop, 22 seconds.

^ I can have Firefox and iTunes open and running from cold in 22 seconds. This thing is unreal now.

I think my HDD must have been on it's way out to take so long to boot up, certainly plenty of space left on the drive and 8GB of RAM available. Although it was never this fast even in it's younger days.

Just as a test to show the difference (sad I know) I decided to see how much I could get done in under 2 minutes. The old HDD took 1 minute 40 seconds to get to log on screen. Easily another 20 seconds from password entry until it had settled down so I could use Firefox etc. without it spitting feathers.

So I fired it up, put password in, used Firefox to visit sky news briefly, opened mail to find one junk email which I deleted quickly, opened iTunes and played 5 seconds of 1 song, closed all programs and shut the computer down. All in 1 minute and 50 seconds!

Plus you don't need a computer pro to fit the SSD for you. I just followed a YouTube tutorial video.  LL.B (Hons) - University of Derby
LOT (Lord of Time) - University of Gallifrey

Doc , Did you follow the instruction exactly as per that link in this thread as it shows connecting the ssd to the mac 1st and copying from original to ssd if so whats the 16mb flash drive you bought for ? .
As you see I am a bit confused how to go about it , just bought the flash drive £7 del and awaiting pension day to buy the MX100 ssd .
Is it possible to list step by step how you did it for me ? , swopping over the drives seems straightforward its the rest I would need help with .

Thanks

Last edited by Lurcher on 21st Aug 2014 2:08 pm. Edited 2 times in total

A word of warning re solid state drives. They are great while they are working but they can fail with no warning. Normal hard drives give you an inkling that they are old, tired or in trouble. SSD's just turn off like a light globe that blows. One minute they are working and then they are not. I have one in my laptop and it is great, but I make sure my backup routine is in order.

...

+1 to that...

Having said that, any component (motherboard, RAM, PSU etc) can fail without warning and so, whatever the configuration, a solid backup strategy is critically important. I find that Acronis works well, with regular incremental backups to a NAS drive.
Also test your backup occasionally... can you successfully restore files you've previously backed up?

... ...

Be true to yourself. That way happiness lies...

I installed an SSD into my home PC about 6 months ago followed by a new graphics card a couple of months later only to have the motherboard fail last month. Age of motherboard meant it was not really viable to replace like with like so new processor/motherboard/memory purchased and installed. Just swapped the drives and graphics card and let windows sort out the drivers. 40 seconds from power on to usable desktop including typing in my password, and a good proportion of that is the bios loading the RAID settings rather than Windows itself.

Note to The Doctor, the second you open up anything connected to the internet in windows or ios the machine hardware becomes irrelevant. Opening Firefox and doing anything here in the Scottish countryside takes an age compared to home on 100Mb broadband. If you want to show how fast a system is you need to run benchmarks that are fully internal to the system you are testing.