SSDs Make a Lot of Difference
For developers, they’re a no-brainer.
Today, I acquired a Solid State Drive (SSD) to replace the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) in my Macbook Pro 13-inch from 2011. As an iOS developer, I have to constantly build apps within Xcode (the software development platform for Mac and iOS), which uses a fair bit of I/O on the system’s hard drive. Instead of buying a new system (something that I can’t afford right now), I decided on getting an SSD (Samsung 840 — 250 GB) to see if it would make a difference to my Macbook’s performance.
I was in for a treat.
Not only does my Mac run much faster day-to-day (e.g. boot times and application/file loading are about 10 times faster), but my builds on Xcode are instantaneous! This solution allows me to overcome the hair-pulling of waiting for little chunks of loading time, whenever I use my Mac, for a modestly small £130.
