There are times that I feel my MacBook Pro is a bit slow. The main culprit really is the hard drive. I’ve got a decent processor (2.53 Ghz), adequate memory (4GB) but my hard drive is just 5400 rpm. That’s where the bottleneck is. When I’m multi-tasking and the Mac needs to write to the hard drive because the RAM is full it takes quite awhile and that plainly sucks. Especially if you’re trying to beat a deadline and your computer can’t keep up with you.

You can get a Patriot 128GB SSD at Fry’s for around $399.99. That’s still quite a big difference from a regular laptop hard drive. You can get a 250GB 7200 rpm laptop drive for less than a $100. That’s quite a disparity both in size and price. But you’re paying for speed. Is that price difference worth it.

A friend of mine recently purchased a SSD for his MacBook Pro and posted a video on YouTube showing of the performance. In the video he proceeds to launch all the apps he has on his dock. The MacBook Pro performs quite nicely. In my experience usually when I launch Photoshop and Parallels, my MacBook Pro almost grinds to a halt. His barely breaks a sweat.

Other videos around the net also show comparisons between SSD and ordinary drives. The difference is very noticeable. You get quicker boot times, you’re able to multitask better because apps run faster.

Is the huge price difference worth it? In my honest opinion, as of now regular consumers should hold off. Sure, you get the performance but it’s still quite expensive for the storage it offers. If you’re not using your Mac for work that requires a lot of multitasking then the SSD isn’t worth it yet. You’ll be paying a hefty price for storage.

Plus with most people’s data growing larger and larger because of all the digital photos, music and data they save, apart from your SSD you’re really need an external drive to offload data too and that will be added expense.

If you’re using your Mac for work and you multitask a lot then it might be beneficial. The amount of performance you’ll get from the drive might be well worth the premium.

As for me, as much as I would love the performance increase. I don’t need speed that much that will justify spending that much money. Maybe next year when prices drop further.

*Thanks to mindless for allowing to me to post his video.

Post from: EveryJoe

SSDs On Your Mac, Is It Time To Upgrade?

Yesterday I went to run one of my other favorite tools, CCleaner, and it didn’t appear to be on my machine. I love CCleaner, so I’m not sure why I would have removed it if I had, so that made me a bit curious.

Later I noticed that a VPN connection that I had setup in my “Network Connections” list was also gone.

I thought to myself that maybe running the defrag tool would have somehow moved these files and defragmented the hard drive in a way that would have deleted them from the system?

Anyone know the answer to that one?

Post from: EveryJoe

Will Defrag Delete Files

The company got more out of their bargain hard drives after learning the information it contained namely: building blueprints, Lockheed Martin’s missile test launch procedures, medical records, confidential letters, and confidential corporate information.

At the very least, these information fell in the hands of a security company. It would have looked but if these information went to bad guys that could capitalize on these things.

Be careful when disposing of your hard drives because deleting your data only flag the sectors as deleted and available and these could easily be retrieved by a lot of downloadable software on the internet.

Image source Computer hard drive sold on eBay ‘had details of top secret U.S. missile defence system’.

Information source Computer hard drive sold on eBay ‘had details of top secret U.S. missile defence system’.

Post from: EveryJoe

Be Careful with Your Hard Disk

I’m trying to get things back online and organized on my laptop for working with clients. One of the things I used to do is have many of the frequently used files for clients set to be available offline when I’m disconnected from our network.

The problem was that I quickly ran out of available free space on my hard drive to maintain all the files I may need along with those programs and options that are run locally from the machine all the time.

Here’s my question, can I easily redirect and RELY on moving my default offline files location to my portable, Western Digital 250GB USB drive?

Obviously this is my work machine and it needs to be reliable and no major unexpected issues arise when I’m not expecting them.

Post from: EveryJoe

Specifying Offline File Folder Location