In early 2008, while working on a time-sensitive development project, the power supply and motherboard in my four year old homemade workstation failed and I was forced to make a decision: build another machine myself or give in and buy a machine with a good support contract. I decided to go with the latter, so I went down to the local Apple store and bought a Mac Pro (remember, this was a time-sensitive project, so I really needed the machine up and running within a day). At the time, I intended to install Windows on it and run with it, but after playing around a bit with OS X, I decided that I really liked the operating system and wanted to switch over to it permanently.
The only problem with this was that I still needed to be able to develop .NET applications using Visual Studio, so I needed to either use Boot Camp to run a copy of Windows or set up Windows to run in a virtual machine. After a bit of research, I decided to use VMWare Fusion to run a Windows virtual machine within OS X. Problem solved. I was, and continued to be, very happy with the solution.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I realized that the performance of my virtual machine (and OS X Snow Leopard in general) was starting to degrade dramatically. It was getting to the point where OS X would take minutes to boot up and my virtual machine was almost unusable. What to do?
I had already upgraded the Mac Pro to six gigabytes of memory, so I didn’t think throwing more memory in the machine would solve the performance issues. I did a bit of research, and found a number of articles touting impressive performance gains brought about by the installation of solid state drives. The only catch? They aren’t cheap. But being that I was looking for a good end of the year tax deduction or two, I decided to go ahead and pull the trigger.
I received my Intel X25-M drive in the mail today, and followed these instructions to replace my existing SATA boot drive with the new solid state drive (note that my boot drive also contains my virtual machine images). And the difference is amazing! Mac OS X boots up three times as fast as it did, all of my applications (including VMWare Fusion, Photoshop, and other “heavy” applications) startup within three seconds, and my virtual machine runs *almost as fast as a native Windows machine. In short, I am very happy with the purchase, and don’t think I’ll go back to using normal drives anytime soon.