New SSD for Work Mac

I feel the need… the need for speed! 😎

I just finished installing a new solid state drive in my work computer. It’s a half-terabyte, the same as the hard drive I removed. The speed improvement is enormous. Even though Spotlight is currently indexing the drive, everything is super snappy.

The full story is that I have had this MacBook Pro since late 2011, and with it coming up on its third birthday, I asked Harold and Brian if there was going to be a replacement process. Esri used to have all of their computers on two year leases, so I went through three Dell laptops in the first six years I was there. This Mac is not on lease, and so I didn’t know what would happen. As it turns out, there wasn’t really a process for replacing it. That’s good, since it is performing well and meeting all of my needs at work. I upgraded the memory in it late last year, which helped a lot.

So I made a proposal to Brian that I would upgrade the internal drive to an SSD instead of pushing for a new computer. My reasoning was pretty solid: with the SSD I expected the performance of the Mac would improve nearly as much as a new one (it seems to have) for less than $500. As well, I would be replacing the part most likely to fail in the Mac: the spinning disk. I also now have the old internal drive in an external USB enclosure (I needed to get that to clone the internal drive to the SSD), so I can make an offsite backup every week over and above my always-on Time Machine backup.

Brian asked for a quote so he could budget for next year. I got a quote from Memory Express and it turned out they had a sale on, so the whole thing, SSD, USB enclosure and tax would be $318.

Brian saw that and immediately put it into motion so I picked up the drive on Thursday night, did a complete backup and cloned the disk last night, and made the swap this morning. For $318, I’ll have an immediate performance boost, less chance of a drive failure, and an offsite backup plan. What a bargain.