Upgrading Your MacBook Pro with a Solid State Drive

I am a strong advocate of SSD drive because it has no moving parts as seen in the picture. Yes, these drives are relatively more expensive than the magnetic drives (the drive on the left with the circular disk). However, the price difference is not so much now that these SSD drives are beyond the average person's reach. You can get a decent SSD drive at 256GB for $120. If you want more space, a 512GB SSD is around $200. In other words, SSD drives now are at 50 cents a gig, a sweet spot for many people.

Upgrading an SSD drive on a PC is relatively easy than a Mac computer. The reason being Apple wants you to buy the drive from them. There is a particular aspect of SSD that can hinder its performance. This is known as garbage collection which you can read it here in its gory detail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification#BG-GC

TRIM is one aspect of garbage collection that is OS dependent. Apple has its own way to implementing TRIM. Therefore you have to do some extra work if you use a SSD drive that is not "approved" by Apple including using a tool like Trim Enabler. Remember, enabling TRIM is not required to make the unapproved SSD drive work, but if you want to squeeze every bit of performance out of your SSD drive in your Mac, you have to do this.

 http://www.cindori.org

After all is done properly and your Mac has a SSD drive, you can see the dramatic difference in its performance. This is especially true with big programs like Photoshop and if you run Windows on VMWare or Parallel.

Here is the article that explains upgrading to SSD drive on your Mac.

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4741