Playing with an old-generation SSD for a week
I installed an old-generation SSD on my MacBook Pro and used it a full week. It’s a kingston SSD V-now 64GB SATA, an old-generation that offers 100MB/s read and 80MB/s write performance, that is theorically close to the performance of my WD 1TB 2.5″ hard-drive, and is rated to have bad performance on little block write.
I have 2 things in mind: asking myself if an old-generation SSD performs better than 2.5″ hard-drive, and if so, if my laptop will be faster and if I will go to a big SSD upgrade (says Crucial C300 256GB SATA 6Gb/s) or upgrade to Core i5/i7 new MacBook Pro?
I began to try it on my Hackintosh, Quad-Core 4×3.4Ghz, 8GB, instead of my RAID-0 of 7200rpm hard-drive for Mac OS X, but I didn’t found it really faster, and had the impression that it was slower. But, I didn’t do the basic operation of ZEROing the drive before installing Mac OS X on it, and comparing an old-generation SSD against a RAID-0 of 3.5″ hard-drives used on their 20% outer space (the fastest part) is not representative of my laptop use.
On my MacBook Pro Core2 duo 2×2.8Ghz, XBench result is 65.95, nothing extraordinary, I attained far better results with a RAID-0 in eSATA using the ExpressCard port, up to 150, 2.2X faster 
But after cleanup (ZEROing) the SSD, full installation, installation of FireFox, Mobile Me synchronization, NetBeans, iWorks, and some other tools, it just fly, everything run smoother, every launch is faster, no more pause, I didn’t have the feeling that something is sluggish, my laptop seems faster to me than my Quad-core 4×3.4Ghz desktop, and this feeling to have something fast that react quickly whatever I ask for is reall astonishing. Like a new laptop, or a big big upgrade.
And it’s a really slow SSD by today’s standards, for example the Crucial C300 is 2.5X faster on anything you do, but I am not sure I will really see a difference, as now my laptop seems really top-notch.
In conclusion, an old-generation SSD doesn’t seems to be faster on benchmarks than actual 2.5″ SATA hard-drive, but on real-life situation, everything is faster and a Mac OS X laptop more responsive, giving better feeling, even than Quad-core 4×3.4Ghz desktop! So it’s impressive and an effective path to upgrade YOUR laptop
PS: Forgot to write that my laptop is totally silent actually, less fan noise (seems to have an effect on it too!) and no more all the little noises that a physical hard-drive is doing from time to time. Quiet
