Spring Cleaning with SSD

Solid State Drives are an expensive way to give longer life to your PCs - as it did with my 2008 iMac

Earlier this year, I set about resolving some long standing issues with my 2008 iMac by giving it a spring clean fresh install with Mountain Lion.  It removed a lot of build issues and legacy OS files from my iMac given its original Leopard install. And while I was happy with a return to its original snappiness back in 2008, I was still weighing up upgrading over the short term to the 2012 iMacs for even better performance.

Faced with choices for upgrading and adding new tech and gadgets in the coming year, it occurred to me that there may be a a more effective route to getting more bang for the buck on the iMac front.  Cut a long story short, I identified OCZ as one of a number of recommended vendors to use in upgrading the iMac disk drive.

The choice ultimately came down between the DIY approach (with various downside risks for open heart surgery on the iMac without the necessary equipment and dust-free environment) and using a Apple Maintenance provider to perform the work.

Ensuring I took a clean back up with SuperDuper!, this was a relatively straightforward exercise and I had the machine back in few days.

Since restoring data and reinstalling my applications, the value of its performance is not found in benchmarks such as GeekBench, which still rates the 64-bit iMac the 4500-4800 range. With machine start up in less than 20 seconds, applications loading in less than 3 seconds mean a far better snappiness and overall satisfaction of using my iMac. It also increases the life to the machine ahead of being able to handle the forthcoming OS X 10.9 Mavericks release, with its focus on more performance and user based enhancements.

Upgrading the iMac to a 2012 and beyond release is now unlikely to happen for another 12-24 months at the very least.

Recommendation?  Put SSDs in any old PC you night have if you want to prolong its life. Not the most original article I've posted, but worth spelling out the experience and the benefits to readers thinking about it.