Plaidophile

I finally got sick of how crappy my laptop's hard drive was for Logic, and upgraded to a nice big SSD. Holy cats this thing is fast. 190MB/sec write speeds, booting is really fast (it's kind of weird having all my startup apps start up right at startup!) and everything works great. I also managed to get it for $445 shipped; the deal at SSD Solutions seemed too good to be true, but the reviews said it was legit, and yeah, so far it's exceeded expectations. Not a refurb, not an obvious bootleg... I think they might be loss-leading in an attempt at becoming a "featured merchant" on Amazon (since right now they're pretty much buried in the listings).

Transferring data from my old drive was pretty easy. I used a SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter and the Mac OS X data migration tool (which was also nice enough to let me turn off transfer of my iTunes folder, which is way too big and is now going to live on my NAS, with all the problems that implies).

I think the most striking thing about it is just how quiet my computer is when the CPU fan hasn't kicked in. I hadn't realized how much of its idle noise was the hard drive. It's also running a lot cooler and presumably the battery will last longer. I am also of course looking forward to not having Logic constantly complain about a "system overload" every time I try recording on a project that I haven't gotten entirely in the readahead cache after letting my computer go to sleep for a couple seconds.