Macbook Pro SSD Upgrade Guide – Kingston SSDNow V+100 64GB Review

1. Introduction2. The Kingston V+100 64GB SSD3. Installing the SSD4. SSD vs. HDD Performance Comparison5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

We decided to conduct some basic tests to illustrate the performance differences between the standard hard drive and the Kingston V+100 64 GB solid state drive.  We used a Macbook Pro 13 Model A1278 (2009) for these tests which features a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB 1066MHz RAM and a 160GB 5400rpm hard drive.

X Bench is a comprehensive benchmarking program developed for Mac OS X that contains within it a hard drive benchmarking tool.  We will be using this to show the performance difference between the standard hard drive and the Kingston solid state drive.  We used X Bench Version 1.3 in this test.

The scores achieved by the Kingston SSD are extremely impressive, in some cases over 600% better than those achieved by the stock mechanical drive.

Synthetic benchmarks are all well and good but most users will be wondering how upgrading to a solid state drive will improve their day to day computing experience on their Macbook.

In our real world tests we saw impressive performance improvements all round, especially in OS X boot time which was reduced by 40 seconds.  The whole OS X user experienced seemed much more snappy with the Kingston SSD than with the original mechanical hard drive.

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