[Closed] Will an SSD make my computer faster?

You mean Macbook Pro.

I put a Intel X25M 160GB SSD in my Macbook pro 2.4/4GB and noticed a huge difference. Startup is 16s from 42s, I can click on every icon on my dock at the same time, and nothing will take longer than 1s to load. Mail loads in 1s as opposed to about 10s. Even open-office opens in about 5 seconds rather than 20.

You don't notice it per-sae, but when you go back to a machine with a spinning platter drive, you will be wanting to throw it out the window in the first minute or so.

Best single-upgrade I've made in 10 years.

Interesting...I remember a couple of years ago people were mucking about getting their computers to boot off solid state memory at blisteringly fast speeds.

Can you get SSD for any laptop/computer or is this a mac thing? SSD would make a good portable drive seeing as mine broke after less than a year 🙁

Test of various ssd's in one of this months computer mags. A quick scan in the local Smith's reading room revealed a big difference in performance, and prices.

SSD's are pretty common now and certainly not just a 'Mac thing', they are still pricey though. They do make a fair difference when used as boot drives but you can get used to them pretty quickly so you still perceive things as slow :p Not to sure on longterm reliability either, the highend models have a lot of hidden space for when sectors fail (so a 64GB drive might actually have 75GB capacity but only 64GB is addressable) the drive will then auto-remap failed areas to the hidden area - not sure if cheaper models do this or not.

Spooky you can get SSD's for any machine that supports a SATA or SAS interface. They're still pretty pricey right now with limited capacities though, but give it three years and I suspect they'll be the norm.....

Best upgrade ever.

But all SSDs are not equal. Basically at the moment, only 2nd gen intel drives, and drives with indilinx controllers are worth while. Others are either no faster than a mechanical drive, or have bad stuttering issues that can cause your machine to stall. Excellent articles on anand tech, I recommend you read them.

If you're not swapping out the optical drive for a HD too, then you probably want a 160gig drive, which means about £315 on an intel X-25m g2.

Ouch. Just googled it, and found
a) Some amazing videos of how fast the intel ones load stuff compared to a normal drive. Convincing me that I really could do with one.
b) The price. Oh well.

if its going into a desktop machine then id get a smallish capacity ssd (32 or 64gb ) for boot partition ie the drive you stick windows on and then use a normal hdd to store documents and data on ( you could reuse the drive the ssd would replace )

What disco stu suggests is what I have in my desktop. I've a 40gig intel drive, plus a platter drive for bulky stuff. However it's just a machine to work on really, and the OS, plus work apps and data is about 20gig, so this works well.