Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know how I’ve been a little obsessed with my MacBook’s hard drive over the last week or so. For everyone else, allow me to recap….

A few days after getting my shiny new 2008 MacBook home, I noticed a sound coming from the area where the HDD is located. I’ve had enough drives over the years to know it was the sound of the heads parking. All well and good I hear you say. And you’d be right. The only problem was the noise would happen, then the disk would spin back up, then it would do it again. Rinse, repeat. Now don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t loud. It was however just loud enough so when I was using the thing in bed, it started to get on my nerves. I’m not known for my tolerance of slight annoyances and that thing annoyed me. A lot. (yes I know I’m a bit strange, tell me something I don’t know!).

After much Googling, forum reading and posting I came to the conclusion it was some aggressive power management feature of Leopard. Some said their clicking only started after upgrading from Tiger, which made even more sense. It would appear that the power management, coupled with a drive that was a little louder than normal resulted in me wanting to launch the MacBook out my window and under the closest passing car. So, what do I do now I asked myself. I fixed it the only way I know how: I threw even more money at the thing !

Enter the OCZ Core v2 60GB SSD (Solid State Drive). For those who aren’t aware, Solid State Drives are what everyone hopes will be the future of notebook storage. Imagine a few USB thumbsticks sellotaped together and stuck in a 2.5in chassis and you’re not too far off. The advantages? No moving parts mean better battery life (hopefully, though it’s debatable) and make the notebook much more durable. No longer do you have to worry about moving your portable in case you damage the HDD while it’s still spinning away.

The other main advantage to SSD is speed. OCZ claim the Core v2 is capable of read speeds up to 170 MB/secand writes of up to 98 MB/sec. Should be a nice bump from the stock 5400rpm drive no? Only one way to find out !

The drive is available in 30GB, 60GB, 120GB and 250GB flavours, with prices to match. I stumped for the 60GB. It wasn’t ludicrously expensive (£171 shipped) and I don’t need that much space on a MacBook (my current install weighs in at just 15GB!) I ordered yesterday and it arrived this morning. With screwdriver in hand I set about swapping the drives over. First though, I made a short video of the MacBook booting with the stock drive in, so we’d have a basis for a speed comparison.

As if by magic I shall imbed the aforementioned video riiiight here !

The swapping of the drives could not have been any easier. The instructions are in the manual for the MacBook, but anyone with half a brain cell should be able to figure it out themselves. Unscrew one screw, then four hex screws and the original drive’s out. Do the whole thing backwards and the new one’s in. So easy I reckon I could have let my Mother do it !

Once together I had a few problems getting OS X to install, but taking the drive out and putting it back in seemed to fix it. The wonders of modern technology !

Once I got the install to start, it screamed through in 11 minutes. Installing all my applications happened in similar fashion. Once done I did another video, and I think the speed speaks for itself !

I’ve no software to do any more scientific tests, but all I can say is the thing is fast. Nothing bounces on the Dock once clicked, everything seems to open in the blink of an eye. It actually feels like using an iPhone, though I know that sounds like a crazy thing to say.

The OCZ drives have been getting a bit of a slating on various forums, with one particular review over on Anandtech ripping the thing to shreds. Reports of stuttering and appalling write speeds are not uncommon, but for some reason it seems to work flawlessly when snuggled up to a MacBook. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. Others have been reporting results similar to mine on forums around the internet, so either OCZ fixed the problems with v2, or there’s something about Vista and/or certain chipsets it doesn’t like. All I know is it works with the MacBook, and it works well ! Of course I’ll report back should it all go belly up and scream to a laggy halt. Let’s hope not !

Now I’ve just got to work out how to get my old HDD to work with my Xbox 360 and I’ll be laughing !

For anyone interested in SSD, have a read of Paul Stamatiou’s post on his blog about the Intel X25-M, possibly the best SSD out there. This post was what made me want an SSD in the first place – thanks Paul !

Let me know if none of this makes sense, I’m writing it on the way out the door ! If you have any questions fire away in the comments section below !