The Basic Guide to Buying SSDs

Quote from anti1987 : Say I want to buy a SSD solely for my OS and Office. Is there an easy way to move my OS from where it currently resides to an SSD?

It's very easy to move your OS to the SSD. There will sometimes come bundled with the SSD a disk transfer kit, basically a cable that plugs into the SSD and the other end into the USB of your system, and a disc with a program that transfers things for you. You can select the OS only, or add other programs and/or files.

I recently upgraded my 13 inch MBP (the model just before retina) from 7850g spinner to 512 g SSD (Crucial M4, sata II I think).

Transfer everything over, for me I transferred the entire disk.
Download and install trim enabler for the Mac, since mac doesn't support trim on non-mac purchased SSDs.
Upgrade your ram to the max your system supports. It never hurts and usually speeds things up. For me I went from 4 to 16 gigs, even though apple says 8 is the max. I looked online and read several reports that 16 was the max. paid about 80 bucks on Newegg through SD.
Install the latest firmware! Very Important. I saw a massive speed boost after I got the firmware updated. You need to download it, burn it to a disk, use that disk as your start up (hold shift when starting up a mac, then choose the disk as the startup disk) and install the firmware then restart.

After you've done all that your computer will be fast as lightning. I'm getting about 260-270 speeds on my SSD. You'll get double that on a SATA III. As the OP wrote, there is no need for a SATA III if you're not tansferring lots of gigs persistently.

My mac starts up from shutdown in usually 8-10 seconds. Once I sign in and put my password it loads the startup apps just about instantly. Used to be between 3-5 minutes with the spinner. So that's a huge improvement. I never have to close apps, though I do because it gets to be too much with a thousand different windows opened.

Hope this helps someone a bit.

Great guide! But it should be noted that besides the increased speeds, SSDs have no moving parts, so are completely silent, produce less heat, and draw less power than spinning disk drives. All very important benefits in laptops.

Also, all SSDs are such a vast improvement over conventional HDDs, it doesn't matter much what speed SSD you get, it will still be ~85% of a performance gain over HDDs in real-world performance. If you want the best, pay for greater reliability, not a marginal speed increase in some benchmark.

Thanks for the info.

Quote from themaster13 : OCZ Vertex 4 is one of the best.

Second.

Quote from josephjpeters : Second.

Just ordered one ...trying to get that latest and greatest without paying that much more!! lowest SATA 3 256GB models were going for $150 picked this one up for $190 worth it for me!

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Thanks for the info!

does it matter which ssd for mac or pc?

would this be a worthwhile upgrade even on a $300 laptop (fujitsu lifebook lh531) purchased last year?

Quote from kanguy72 : does it matter which ssd for mac or pc?

It shouldn't but it's a good idea to check with mac users on a commonly used SSD since there have been problems in the past. Also you will need to take extra steps on OS X to get TRIM enabled.

Quote from TheMightyQuinn : would this be a worthwhile upgrade even on a $300 laptop (fujitsu lifebook lh531) purchased last year?

It's a worthwhile upgrade, assuming you can swallow the price and size constraints, on any system!

Quote from anti1987 : Say I want to buy a SSD solely for my OS and Office. Is there an easy way to move my OS from where it currently resides to an SSD?

try "ghost"

I have been really happy with the Crucial M4. They have gotten so cheap! I have purchased 3 and they have all exceeded my expectations.

Quote from anti1987 : Say I want to buy a SSD solely for my OS and Office. Is there an easy way to move my OS from where it currently resides to an SSD?

There is a great SSD guide here [overclock.net] on how to install and optimize your OS if you decided to go with that. Hope that helps.