Last week I was browsing for SSD options for some computers at work, and personally lusting after one of them. Then, as if it were predestined, NewEgg emails me the next day saying, “Oh, Remember that SSD you were lusting after? By the way, it’s on super sale. Just so you know. No biggie, just thought I’d mention it.”
Damn.
So I bought it.
Anyway, to be specific, it’s the Samsung 830 Series, 256GB.
And there was a funny bit about the box…
Yes, that’s the sticker sealing the box. So if you open the box you’re “Voiding the warranty.” I’m sure this is an oversight, but I found it pretty funny. There isn’t one of these stickers on the bottom flap, so I opened that one instead. Take that Samsung! (I’m sure that’s violating the DMCA… somehow…)
After tricking the box sticker, I hooked up the drive to a USB->SATA adapter I’ve got, and used a nice little bit of software called Carbon Copy Cloner, to clone my OS X boot drive to the SSD. At this point the SSD is bootable, has all my stuff already set up, and I can just swap the drives out and OS X won’t care.
Anyway, here’s a shot of the Mini ripped apart enough to swap the hard drives. At this point I’ve already pulled out one of the two stock drives, and have yet to put in the new SSD.
After putting everything back together, I booted back up, and ran another little piece of software called Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. In there, I ran a test against the one remaining stock drive (A 5400 RPM Laptop Drive) and a test on the new SSD.
The Standard Drive – Read: 73MB/s, Write: 77MB/s
The New SSD – Read: 477MB/s, Write: 395MB/s
Keep in mind that these results aren’t necessarily perfect. The SSD is hosting the operating system which is running while the test is running. The standard drive hosts my home directory, which probably wasn’t really being used much at the time of the test. The tests may or may not be limited by, or are almost certainly impacted by the SATA controller in my Mac Mini. In summary, there’s a bajillion factors to take into account, but it’s still a monumental difference.
Applications are starting quite quickly, and it seems the OS is doing pretty well too. Not that it was slow before on a quad core with 16GB of ram…
Anyway, I’m quite pleased, and pretty surprised at how much the price of SSDs has dropped in the past year or two.