KingstonFE
Contributor
Listen. Just stop, and listen. How much noise is your computer making? Can you hear it? Are the fans going? Is the hard drive making its constant little noise?
Not the one I'm using. It's silent. That's because it's got a solid state drive (SSD), which roughly doubles its read/write speed and improves the performance of the laptop I'm using it in by about 50%.
That's quite an improvement - equivalent to upgrading your machine completely. The drive in question is a Kingston SSDNow 100 256GB (model number KINGSTON SVP100S2256G), which I'm using in a three-year-old MacBook laptop running Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 with 4GB of RAM (the maximum it can take).
Hard numbers
You can see precisely how much the SSD gooses the performance: using the Xbench benchmarking suite, the Macbook scored 193.67. Comparing that to the average for Macbooks - which is 101.96 - you can see that something's changed.
If you look at this comparison of two similar-specced Macbooks, one with and one without an SSD, the difference is pretty dramatic when it comes to the disk work - and that affects everything else. Basically, adding an SSD is like making your machine a year to 18 months younger.
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Review: Kingston 256GB V100 SSD: your machine, on speed | Technology | guardian.co.uk