SSD Drive in a Macbook Pro

This morning, I came in early to swap out the hard drive in my Macbook Pro to one of the new Solid State Drives (SSD). After Googling (that's now a word isn't it?) how to open up the case and replace the drive, I sat down with my 00 phillips and T6 torx and started removing screws. Twenty one tiny screws later, I had the top off. Only a couple more screws and a few cables to go. Success, and better yet, the laptop still runs! Right now, I am doing a system install on the new drive from my Time Machine backup. My hope is that the new drive will be a bit faster and a whole lot sturdier. Another plus is that it is about 50% larger than the old drive. I still want to try out the PGP whole disk encryption that never seemed to work with the old drive. The new drive is a Super Talent Ultra SATA 256GB SSD supposedly with write speeds of 160 MB/s and read speeds of 200 MB/s. We'll see...

Tuesday Afternoon - The installation is finished and the machine boots really fast. Easily twice as fast. Similar speed increases for starting up applications so the laptop feels much faster. I'd say this was a good upgrade plus I now have almost 155 GB free. I won't know if there is any power savings but from everything I've read online, probably not. Just to mess things up more, I'm running PGP whole disk encryption. So far it is 10% completed and shows another 4 ½ hours to go. With the original hard drive, this program always hung at 1% completed so this is looking good. Not that I have anything super secret on my laptop but it is a good practice. I wanted to try it myself before recommending it to anyone else.

I walked down to University and College for lunch and came back on the scenic route with a stop at Ballaine Lake and the Geophysical Institute. So I'm still plugging away with the walking though I'm starting to feel really run down again. I rode the bike in this morning and it was a bit chilly. I think that it was only a little above freezing. With a little push, I may be able to make my walking goal this month. Though I'm tempted to ride anywhere I go.