What are some tips for replacing my MacBook Pro hard disk with SSD?

I would like to replace my MacBook pro hard disk with an SSD, without reinstalling everything. I am looking for your experience on

• good SSD drive models that have good performance at a fair price
• the relocation strategy so that I get my old system migrated with no trouble or pain from the old hard drive to the new one (including additional hardware needed, I guess a usb-sata connector)

Solution 1:

Allow me to recommend you the OWC ones. You have an “extreme RE” (which I believe you won’t need) and the Pro, which is arguably one of the fastest and most secure drives so far.

I’m sure you can google for comparisons with other drives but I’ve installed a various numbers of SSDs (albeit not only in Macbooks) and the OWC ones are what I’ve chosen for me.

Jeff Atwood himself made a comparison (but he didnt include the OWC at the time), which you can find in this blog post.

Don’t forget to read through the comments, as there’s value in there too.

I’d say that excluding the OWC (which I prefer), the Crucial C300 should be the next in line.

Solution 2:

I've just bought the Crucial C300 SSD and it's amazingly quick. From benchmarks around the web like this one at bit-tech you can see its the best for the money around at the moment! I got the 128 GB for just over £240 and never looked back.

You can do a time machine backup and restore it to your SSD but as its a laptop you might need to plug it into a USB-SATA to setup. In my case I started fresh (coming from a windows background, I prefer it)!

Here's a video of Crucial testing two MacBooks. One with a disk drive and one with the C300. You can see how much improvement you get from it!

Also, start time for me is now around 20seconds with an even quicker shutdown.