the onda

Not enticed by the additional cores and upgraded memory bus on the i7 laptops, I opted instead to finally make the plunge to solid state for my main laptop disk drive.

Man what a difference it makes!

I don't think that I've felt such a noticeable difference in the performance of a personal computer since Apple switched from PPC to Intel a few years back. Where there was latency in applications before, there is just instant gratification now. And more surprisingly, the apps that seem to benefit the most are the ones I would have thought were CPU bound due to all of the layers of abstraction: VMWare and Chrome/Firefox/Safari. If I were Intel, I'd be more worried about SSD storage these days than cramming cores into fixed dies.

It's not cheap— in fact, it is still atrociously expensive: on the order of $2.80/GB versus about $0.20/GB for the fastest possible spinning platter in the same 2.5 inch form factor. And what is more, at least on OSX, the operating system is horrendously not optimized for the different read/write characteristics of an SSD— and still you get this crazy performance boost (if you do take the plunge, and you are on a Mac, I'd highly recommend this atime hack before you swap your solid state disk in).

I'm sure SSDs as mainstream components are coming though, and to the degree that Apple still cares about their one open OS, I hope they make the investment in SSD filesystem support (like the TRIM command which Windows 7 supports out of the box).

And in the meanwhile it is funny to think that between smartphone, PC, iPad, iPod, etc, nary a platter is spinning in my life. In fact, magnetic platters have become the new tape— useful for backups and not much else.

Even if the price seems too steep to replace your main drive, I'd highly recommend getting a smaller one for the system, and if necessary dropping the DVD player. Even partitioning your data is worth it, given how much newer your computer will feel.