Buyer's Guide: Recommended Solid State Drives (SSD)

A solid state drive makes a superb boot drive for a Mac Pro. See How to Make Your Mac Feel Lightning-Fast and Solid State Drives.

If you travel a lot where your MacBook or MacBook Pro is subjected to frequent bumps and rough handling, you should definitely be looking hard at a solid state drive instead of a hard drive. Not only is it more reliable (no moving parts), it’s silent, low-power and extremely fast.

A solid state drive is an outstanding alternative for those users that can work with a drive in the 128-256GB range.And it will only get better, with 512GB models arriving in the 2010.

As of November 2009, I was using the Crucial 256GB SSD in my MacBook Pro 17 2.93GHz. What a fantastic combination; the performance has really notched up to where the CPU speed is the limiting factor, not the hard drive. But my new choice as of Feb 2010 is the OWC Mercury Extreme, below.

OWC Mercury Extreme Enterprise Class SSD
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Recommended solid state drives PERMALINK

I own the Intel and Crucial offerings (4 of them), but I no longer recommend them as the OWC offering is clearly superior in multiple ways.

The solid state drive (SSD) that I recommend as of February 2010 is the OWC Mercury Extreme enterprise-grade SSD.