Well I’m back, the release of 10.5.2 spurred me into life again! It seems every website out there has covered the new features and minor changes like the option to remove translucency from the Menu Bar and the new features of Stacks so I won’t even bother...

What I will talk about is Solid State Drives.....

In the hoo-ha that surrounded the Macbook Air and the (frankly ridiculous) cost of adding a Solid State Drive I though I would mention my own experiences of SSDs on Macs and PCs

For those of you that have never met me I should begin with the following statement:

‘I hate computer noise’

I hate whistles, i hate clicks, i hate clunks, chirps, whirs, bangs, twangs, scrapes and all the associated aural pollution that comes from using computers. At the office I can put up with it, there’s enough background noise that I don’t notice (added to the fact that my employers use Wyse thin terminals exclusively), but at home, in a quiet bedroom it drives me nuts.

A couple of years ago I cracked out the gaffer tape, and soldering iron and embarked upon a noise fighting spree, a passive power supply was imported from Germany (before they were widely available) fans were replaced and under-volted, variable resistors were added, cardboard ducting was fashioned, cracks were sealed and all of it resulted in a VERY quiet computer.

It took a good few weeks of balancing airflow and heat but by the end of it my Athlon PC was running within spec, cooled only by a pair of variable speed, minimal airflow fans.

Since then every computer I have owned has received similar treatment (even the PowerMacs), except my Mac mini because it was quiet enough already and there really isn’t any scope for fiddling inside one!

All of that lengthy pre-amble was just so I could stress that I went down the SSD route for a very different reason to most, they are silent. I was not hunting for more speed, or more battery life, but less noise.

The first machine to be converted was my faithful old Mini-ITX box, since it was on almost 24/7 it had been running with a 4200rpm laptop hard drive, wrapped in bubble wrap and since this particular model has no CPU fan it was actually silent, there was no need for me to swap to Solid State in it, but as always the Mini-ITX box is the one i use to test new (and wacky) ideas on.

This was some time ago and SSDs were even more expensive back then so my first dabble with Flash was using large CF Cards in IDE adaptors. I decided to ignore all warnings about limited read/write cycles of flash as it was just and experiment and CF cards are cheap. Over the next few months various slimmed down Linux and XP installs graced the card and overall it was a success.

The relative ease of conversion led me to perform the same swap on my tiny Toshiba Laptop. It uses the same 1.8 inch HDs as the new Macbook Air and the original was beginning to sound like a strangled otter so it was ripe for a change.

The Tosh was converted using an IDE to CF adaptor and a 4GB CF card, which comfortably fits a stripped XP image with Photoshop, Office and a few other apps. A 2GB SD card in the slot and another 4GB CF card in the Cardbus slot provide enough storage for mobile computing and now the laptop is actually silent, the fan only ever comes on when its being properly stressed so for 99% of the time i hear nothing!

Next was my Powerbook....

I’ve had this Powerbook G4 (aluminium 1Ghz) for some time now and it’s actually my favourite machine, I’ve just sold my Macbook because I kept using the PB in preference to it.

This particular PB is the 1Ghz model, meaning it doesn’t get anywhere near as hot as newer models, so much so that I have actually NEVER heard the fans come on, I left it running SETI for 8 hours once but the CPU only reached 59C and the fans still didn’t come on so this is one very quiet laptop even before it was converted. The 5400rpm drive that it shipped with had a habit of making odd clicks for no apparent reason, even when not doing anything and since it was almost silent anyway I decided to use it as my next victim.

Now OS X (especially Leopard) is a bit bigger than some OS’s and although I don’t keep much on my laptops for security reasons I realised I would need a bit more than the 4GB CF cards, and I use this laptop a lot so I wanted something a bit more reliable too. I eventually settled on the Samsung PATA 16GB Solid State Drive. it was costly, but only about £50 more than the biggest laptop drives available and in my eyes it’s worth the money.

Installation was very easy (if you’re no stranger to pulling Powerbooks apart) and it functions just like a normal drive. And now the Powerbook is properly 100% SILENT.

With 16GB to play with I actually have Leopard, most of CS3, MS Office, iPhoto, a few web browsers and choice apps on there and still 4GB to Play with. With sensible use and another 4GB CF card in the Cardbus slot I don’t find it cramped at all. There has been much complaining from people reviewing the Macbook Air about having to fit their life into 64GB, personally I don’t have that problem, my laptop is a mobile companion to my desktop, I don’t store my life on it and I use external storage for portability and security.

Overall I’m a SSD convert, they are silent, which was the whole point for me, I can live within the space limitations on mobile machines and yes, they are quicker, not for sustained throughput but random access (most OS feature and App loading) is notably quicker, which is a bonus, for those that really care here’s a couple of Xbench HD tests using the stock Hard Drive and the Samsung SSD, random .