I’m not joking, although that is a very ‘click-baittie’ headline but in this article I’m going to explain why a Solid State Drive (SSD) is the best upgrade I’ve ever made to any computer.

At the moment, I’m using a modified MacPro, it’s got updated processors, RAM and graphics card and at the time before SSD, had four standard hard drives totalling in about 2TB of internal storage.

After a little glance about on eBay, I won a fairly small (32GB) SSD for a very reasonable sum. To make my life easier, I decided that a fresh install of OS X was the way forward.

I installed the drive, loaded OS X and immediately saw the difference. The boot time had gone from 3 minutes to about 30 second and waking from sleep was quicker than the displays could wake up.

After about 3 months of use, the tiny 32GB was running with about 600MB of free space, after having the cashes and temp files cleared.

A second upgraded was needed. This time I shelled out for a 120GB Intel drive. Making the switch was really quite easy. Plugging the new SSD in with an SATA reader and booting the Mac to recovery mode meant that I could access Disk Utility and simply clone the existing SSD to the new one. After that, I checked it booted up alright and with everything shiny, I made the switch.

The difference in usage has been fantastic. Most apps in the dock load instantly and the rest in a matter of seconds. The system wasn’t exactly slow to start with but removing the mechanical hard drive part of the process means it’s like a giant MacBook Air.

Obviously, large capacity SSDs are still very expensive and not really viable if you have a lot of data to store. That’s where additional drives, and external drives full in the gap. Having a SSD as your boot drive though, is, in my experience the best move I’ve ever made for any machine.

Would you like a step by step guide on doing the upgrade? If so, let me know on your social network of choice and I’ll write it up!