I've recently upgraded my hard drive to a Solid State Drive (SSD).

There wasn't any particular reason for the upgrade except that Amazon France, sort of, forced my hand. The Amazon France gift cards that I've accumulated over the years were expiring soon.

Anyway, gift cards from Amazon USA and Canada do not expire, but the ones from elsewhere do. You can check the expiry date on your account page.

So I decided to buy a SSD. It's expensive, but still close to USA prices, which means there's no additional markup. Usually, I just buy art books but on Amazon France, many are marked up compared to Amazon USA.

I'm using the SSD on my 2006 Mac Pro. So Apple users might be able to relate to this review more. You can also fix it onto Windows.

The one I bought was 512GB. It cost almost 8 times more than the standard disk-spinning hard drives. That's crazy expensive. It's around US$650!

I usually use about 200-300GB so that's about the right size.

I do not recommend getting such a huge capacity SSD because the price is too high to justify whatever advantage unless you really need that kind of speed.

If it's just for speeding up the startup time and loading applications, 128GB or even 64GB should be enough. You can get the cheaper traditional hard drives for other data.

Before I had the SSD, it took about 30s to startup my computer. After the SSD was installed, it was about less than 15s. The improvement is around 50-70%, I estimate.

Applications load up faster. Firefox took a second. Photoshop shaved off a few seconds. You can feel the speed. But that's all. In terms of normal usage, you're not going to feel the advantage of the SSD unless you need to read & write a lot of data, typically for video work.

Crucial rates the M4 with a lifespan of 5 years if you write 40GB to it daily. That's writing. Reading data is fine.

They do come with an international warranty of 3 years, but if the service centre is not in your country you will have to mail it overseas.

Installing the SSD onto the Mac Pro requires a 2.5-3.5 inch converter. Icy Dock provides one that basically a clone of traditional hard drives except with an empty shell. You just slide the SSD in, close the casing, and screw onto the sled and you're all ready to put it into the computer.

After installation, on Mac OS, just format it and it will be ready for use.

For backups, I would recommend using CarbonCopyCloner. You can create a clone of the SSD easily which can also be used as a startup disk.

My Mac Pro is actually SATA2 and the M4 is SATA3. So it's not even able to make full use of the potential speed of the SSD.

Usually laptops would come with 5400RPM hard drives which are slower than the standard 7200RPM. It's a good option to upgrade to an SSD for the extra speed. Plus, it runs really cool.

For desktop users, unless you feel frustration working on your computer because of speed, it might not be a worthwhile upgrade.

But if you're buying, definitely get a smaller capacity SSD together with a large traditional one to get the best of both.

I've done a lot of research comparing different brands and it seems that Crucial is the brand that's more highly rated than others. Intel ones are not bad also. Reviews for other brands are not really favorable.

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