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I am about to buy a Macbook Pro, specific model unknown yet.

I am very interested in upgrading to an SSD, as I/O latency is extremely important for my work. However, I have no experience with Macbook Pro performance.

Is it worth it? Will the performance be significantly better? What about durability? Any noticeable effect on battery performance?

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Do note that OSX doesn't have TRIM support for SSDs yet, although the 10.6.4 update has given some indication that it might come in the near future. – Om Nom Nom Jul 17 '10 at 18:25
@Om Nom Nom For that reason, AnandTech recommend SandForce SSDs for Mac users – sblair Jul 28 '10 at 12:48
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I installed an Intel X25M 80 GB SSD on my MBP about 4 months ago.

Unscientifically, I can say that my boot times went from 50 seconds to about 10, including starting my browser, terminal, mail client, and IDE. No application takes longer that 3 seconds to load.

I would guess that my battery life increased about an hour per charge on average.

I haven't had it long enough to determine if performance degrades, though. It has stayed consistent so far.

Again, nothing scientific, but I love my SSD.

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Cool! How did you install the SSD? The X25 is not officially supported by Apple. Didn't this void your warranty? – Yuval A Jul 18 '10 at 11:41
I used the Lifehacker guide at lifehacker.com/5541774/… -- I think if I ever have a problem I'll just swap the old HDD and no one will know the difference ;) – Eric Wendelin Jul 19 '10 at 1:38
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I installed a 240 GB OCZ Agility 2 - A SandForce 1200 Controller Drive - a month ago.

Although the program I used (Carbon Copy Cloner) failed to write to the drive successfully, causing some frustration, I eventually used Disk Utility to image.

After that no problems. Don't worry about no TRIM support in OS X, the drive is fine. Do:

  1. turn "noatime" on
  2. never use any defragmenting software
  3. turn off "safe sleep"

It's taken my drive performance from a stock 5400 rpm HDD from 62 MB/sec to ~270 MB/sec.

Access time for everything is better. Virtual machines run way smoother. Applications launch within 3 seconds.

The drives may not last at this level more than a couple years but I'm stoked so far. You can't go back to platter drives and moving parts after this.

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