I’ve already found, as soon I purchased it, that the standard 250 GB disk of my MacBook Pro is not a very good performing unit, so I’ve already replaced it with a 7200 rpm Western Digital hard disk I’ve available from a previous notebook. Performance increase was good (in the 10-15% range, according to XBench), but there were some drawback, the 7200 rpm disk used more battery and makes more heat.
So I’ve done a further upgrade and replaced it with a new OCZ Velocity 3 Solid State Disk, in a 120 GB capacity.
The previous 7200 rpm disk, evaluated with the XBench program, had a performance index of 60.31, with uncached read of 48 MB/Sec and 22.28 MB/Sec, sequential and random.
The new SSD disk has a new index of 197.52, with read rates of 225.79 and 599.97, performance was dramatically better.
Said that I’ve to say that the SSD usage of Lion OXS is not quite effective and it requires some tweak to work without issues, all requiring to use Terminal and sudo to issue command as root.
Here is the list of what I’ve done, to perform them launch terminal and copy the commands I’ve outlined here:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
This avoid a problem related to Lion freezing when it resumes from hibernation.
sudo pmset -a sms 0
This tells Lion not to use the sudden motion sensor to stop the disk from spinning if the Mac is dropped or does a sudden movement. Not having moving parts having this feature it’s useless with a SSD disk.
