Apologies to those arriving here looking for information relating to U***tu and the use of this ExpressCard SSD. There is nothing relating to it here – Google has taken you on a wrong turn.
So after a false start with the wrong product I end up with a Wintec Filemate SolidGo 48GB ExpressCard 34 Ultra SSD (which is specifically a PCI-based ExpressCard rather than a USB-based one which tend to be a lot slower). The specs on this thing claim 115MB/s read and 65MB/s write which compares to my hard disk with tested scores of 80MB/s read and 78MB/s write – so a lot quicker for reads and marginally slower for writes.
How does this translate into how quickly the Macbook operates ?
Well after quickly duplicating my “OSXBOOT” partition onto the new “disk” using carbon copy cloner onto the new disk (“SSDBOOT”) I can run a few benchmarks :-
| Test | Result for SSD | Result for Spinning Metal |
|---|---|---|
| Menu -> Login | 31s | 27s |
| Word startup | 5s | 16s |
| du of MacPorts | 34s | 109s |
Well apart from the slightly surprising result of the time taken to get from the Refit menu until the login screen being actually quicker for the spinning metal disk, the SSD is approximately 3.2 times quicker! Certainly a worthwhile performance boost … and presumably a suitably chosen SATA SSD would be quicker again.