How to speed up an aging MacBook with a solid state drive

This guide should probably mention that TRIM support is not enabled for after-market SSDs under Snow Leopard or Lion. You are relying completely on the SSD chipset's internal garbage collector to tidy up dirty pages and stave off SSD rigor mortis.

Luckily, the OtherWorldComputing SSD the author chose has a SandForce chipset with a very good garbage collector unlike say an Intel SSD which doesn't. Whether or not the author was aware of that when selecting this particular drive over any other, the guide fails to provide this explanation to the reader.

I've read that the TRIM Support Enabler software will turn on TRIM in Snow Leopard or Lion for after-market SSDs, so Ars might want to check that out and maybe mention it in this guide.

http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322

Likewise an investigation into different SSD firmware updaters is probably warranted. Many firmware updaters for SSD drives I looked into will only run in Windows which can be a real pain considering this is a guide for MacBooks.

I have an Expresscard SSD (Filemate 48GB) on my 2007 Core2Duo MBP. I have installed Snow Leopard, moved all the frequently used apps on it but still point to the old home directory on the hard drive.

The SSD gets quite warm easily, but it actually makes my laptop feel snappier than my work laptop (2010 Core i7 non-SSD). A cold boot takes less than 12-15 seconds, most of it trying to read settings from my home folder in the old hard drive. I believe the ExpressCard uses PCI Express interface which is much faster than SATA on older macbooks.

Here are some resources from my bookmarks:

http://onethingwell.org/post/1610589228/ssd-two-electric-boo...

http://www.macworld.com/article/145185/2009/12/mbpssdcard.ht...

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2009120322015125...

Unggghhhnnn. 15mb/s for 4k random writes???? Was this a cheap, budget SSD or is there some staggering bottleneck on that particular mac that is bringing it to its knees?

But, yeah, an SSD can breath life into an older mac book. I've got a year-old Vertex 2 on a newer MBP (2009) and I get >200Mb/s for 4k random writes. The 1.5gb vs 3gb connection wouldn't explain the 10x difference.