[MacTUG] Wow! SSD performance gains on a macbook

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

Marko recently upgraded a '5.1' Macbook to a SSD drive from OWC. Dale
installed the kit for us.
Marko was only able the use the 3G version, not the 6G version, as his
machine was a bit too old to use the 6Gb SSD. Nonetheless he has
experienced significant performance gains. To test this he ran some tests
on his old hard drive and the SSD. He purchased the kit from OWC that
allowed him to keep his old hard disk and replace his CD drive with the
SSD. Cool, eh? He cloned his old disk to the SSD and then ran some tests
on these identically equipped drives. He did them 3 times and averaged
them out.

The tests were:

1. Time from starting the mac to login screen being displayed
2. Click login button (after entering password) until 'UW Emerge' Client
fully loaded
3. Time from start of Parallels Win 7 VM (with parallels app already
running) to Win7 login prompt
4. Win7 password to Symantec fully running (shield in menu and green dot)
5. Win7 shutdown

Here are the averages of the 3 runs of each test:
	
		Hard Disk	SSD

1)		46s		30s
2)		63s		8s
3)		79s		26s
4)		178s		26s
5)		29s		16s
TOTAL		395s		106s

So on average, the SSD was almost 4 times faster! Particularly note the
launch time of the VM where the performance improvement is almost 7 times
faster! Note that the startup time is only about a 50% improvement. I
would guess that is because a bit of that time is done doing stuff other
than reading the disk, such as testing the RAM an such.

Now marko is using the mac in such a way (e.g. Opening a VM every day)
that really benefits from the SSD. It is possible that some tasks would
not benefit as greatly, but for many users, I think they can look at
really significant improvements.

Our experience of this leads to two conclusions:

1) If the user needs a speed increase, and the rest of the system is OK,
and if they can live with relatively small (e.g. 240BG) drives, an SSD
upgrade is awesome and the cost (less than $400) gives a performance boost
that is a real good bang for the buck. I would think it feels faster than
a non-SSD equipped new macbook pro. Which leads me to the next conclusionŠ
2) I am really looking forward to the next generation MacBooks! I hope the
internet is right that it will be all-SSD (basically bigger macbook airs).
My wife has a macbook air, and in daily use, it is one of the fastest macs
I have used.

don

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Donald Duff-McCracken
Technical Services Manager
Mapping, Analysis & Design
Faculty of Environment
University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 x32151
http://www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/computing/people/don.html
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