Apple hard disk failures or how I stopped worrying and love the SSD

Ever since Apple tried to pursue mainstream, things went bad for them. It’s not like their computers didn’t crash before — that’s normal. But recently, they started to crash a lot. I had a late 2007 white MacBook with a 160GB hard drive. Well, exactly after 12 months, this drive failed me, a few days before the warranty expiration. It started clicking and died. They changed it for free to an even crappier one — it failed too, a few days ago, exactly after 6 months, and out of nowhere. Similarly, started clicking and just died.

I got fed up with mechanical failures, so I decided to go for an OCZ Vertex SATA II solid state drive. I chose a standard version, not the Mac Edition, because it was cheaper, faster and had constant firmware updates. Although some say they have problems with it, like freezing after system wake-up, I don’t. Also, my firmware is old, 1.10, but it doesn’t seem to cause problems either.

The disk comes in a nice, secure package, and the drive itself is a really neat, black box. Fits perfectly in the Mac’s HDD slot — although the star-shaped screws will give you a bit of tough time, if you don’t have a special screwdriver (I didn’t have patience, used pliers…).

Leopard installation went smoothly and was quite quick, although you need to format the drive with the Disk Utility. Windows 7 installation wasn’t that fast, and the actual working OS had long periods of idling, for example after clicking the Start Menu — definitely something wrong with the SSD handling there, Microsoft.

But when I came back to Leopard… it was sort of an amazing experience! The whole system worked like it was on steroids. As if the insides of my old MacBook were full of CPU and RAM. Seriously! 15 seconds from the startup white LED till login screen. 30 seconds to save a 2.5GB file from a DVD. 1 second to start up iPhoto with 1,600 images. Compare these figures with your machines, and if you need more specific data, compare your results from XBench with mine below. I am really happy with this drive — it’s like a new Mac now.

What I’ve learned from the first failure are 2 things — 1. traditional disks are not a good idea in a portable, “throwable” laptop, especially since Apple uses particularly crappy ones; and 2. backup your system on a daily basis, each evening, because you never know when it strikes you. I’m using a nice and free software called iBackup that let’s you backup to any destination, and after the initial process, only updates the changed files.

The second failure thought me that SSD may be expensive, but man, it’s fast! And I don’t want to have any other HDD now.