Solid state drives: caveat emptor, performance degradation with use

Looking for a solid state drive (SSD)? Not just any SSD will do. Some degrade badly with use, very badly.

Hint: one popular brand is toast when used heavily.

Here is an unsolicited quote from a reader:

“I have used several different SSDs over the past year and finally settled for the OWC Mercury Extreme. I have used a Corsair P256, an OCZ Agility EX SLC 64GB, and finally the OWCs.

My real-world experience with the Corsair and OCZ were "meh." They are OK for reads but bitterly slow for small 4K writes. I'm a user experience designer and information architect so I use Photoshop and Illustrator all day long. I'm also a professional photographer and use NX2 and Lightroom for photo management and RAW workflow. I was constantly (weekly or semi-weekly) using DiskTester recondition on both drives to simply make the speed of the SSDs acceptable for daily use.

I recently traded in my old MBP for a new i7 MBP 17" 8GB. I added two 200 GB OWC Mercury Extremes in RAID-0 stripe. This is what a MacBook Pro should feel like from the factory. ” — Carl Antone

While you cannot buy a MacBook Pro as described above, you can get one— see the MPG Pro Laptop.