Recently I changed the hard disk of my MacBook Pro 13″ with an SSD disk.
Previous disk, coming with the Mac, was a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 da 250 Gb. Having my disk fully loaded with data, I looked around for a SSD disk with the same capacity, and I finally bought a SSD Crucial M4 256 Gb.
I asked myself many times, before the purchase, if is was going to be a fancy or need for my work that could justify the expense. After using the SSD disk for a couple of hours, I convinced myself the purchase was absolutely worthwhile!
I didn’t do real benchmarks, but some quick tests based on my daily job. If you work in IT like me, try yourself: b average I run VMware Fusion at least once a day; my virtual pc with Windows XP and 2 Gb of ram, used to take about 10 minutes to fully load (besides that in the first minutes the other programs were unusable). With the new disk, the same task now takes 90 seconds (autologin and all services up). The saving is 8.5 minutes at every run.
I use often Office 2011, especially Word. Its launch now takes less than 2 seconds, before at least 10-15. Let’s say I use it 10 times a day? I saved 130 seconds a day, that is 2 minutes.
I switched long since Microsoft Visio running in a VM with OmniGraffle Pro, native on Mac OS: before loading the program and all its stencils took aaround 1 minute. Now it takes 7 seconds. Let’s suppose I use it once a day, I saved another minute.
And we could go on with many other examples, but the underlying meaning is simple: let’s assume you job value is 50 euros per hour, and you paid 350 euros for the disk. The increased productivity thanks to the SSD disk will let you save by my example 11 minutes per day. Sounds not so many? It will take only 38 days of work to pay the disk, that are less than two months.
Think about it! (and if you need to persuade your boss to buy you one, use my reasoning!)