downgraded my MacBook -- Happy

Well that title is a little misleading. I have upgraded the RAM in my 2007 White MacBook to 2 GB, and have upgraded software to Snow Leopard (actually a clean install). But I sort of downgraded my hard drive. When my MacBook was about 1.5 years old the hard drive died. This had to do with moving to a new location, and the folding table the MacBook was on, collapsed under my MacBook!! It seemed to work OK and had no scratches or other visible damage, but within a month the HD died. So I attribute this to that table collapse. Anyway, I ordered a new 80 GB hard drive to replace the old one. All was/is well with that replacement.

Now for the downgrade. About 9 months ago, I ordered a 32 GB Patriot Warp SSD off eBay. The seller claimed it was SLC, but it did not say anywhere on the SSD itself that it was SLC. I emailed Patriot, who confirmed that it was indeed SLC. Yay!! I installed it in my Lenovo S10, and it ran hot, stuttered, and was generally slower than expected. So I removed it, and thought maybe, since it ran hot, I might put it in a desktop (tower) computer, where I could point a fan at it. I installed Windows XP Home on it, and again, it was slow, and stuttery. Then one day, for kicks, I thought, "why not try it in my MacBook? The worst that would happen is it would be hot, slow, and stuttery there too." So I "downgraded" my MacBook to the slow, hot, stuttery SSD.

Surprisingly, it is neither hot, nor slow in my MacBook!! There was no trouble at all installing it. It does not stutter. It is not blistering fast either, but it is at least as fast as the hard drive was. I still consider it a downgrade because of the lower capacity. Just thought others might be interested in a successful MacBook SSD downgrade that went right.

Some day, I may get a 64 GB Mtron Mobi 3500 for the MacBook, when prices come down some more.

Glad to hear you successfully got the "Patriot" to behave itself. However, how in the world are you getting along with a HD that's only 32 GB? Most of us would quickly run out of space! The software and documents I use for my work take up just about that amount of drive space.

Regards.

I don't have that much stuff to store. I have a 8 GB flash drive with all my docs, some music, (not much, maybe 50 songs) about 10 movies (ripped to divx), 10 simple web pages that I developed for others, Acronis True Image, backups of my bookmarks, QuickBooks backups, Portable Apps (AntiVirus software, OpenOffice, Firefox), and some miscellaneous software downloaded. I still have room to spare. I have several other flash drives (2 16 GB drives and another 8 GB) and external drives with copies of the more important stuff.

Mostly I put pictures, music, and movies on DVDs, or an external drive. Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time I looked at or listened to those files. Hard drives can fail at any time, so I don't trust them to permanently store anything of value. Don't get me wrong, I've seen hard drives last for 10 years, but I've also bought brand new drives that failed within 2 weeks. Thus, I don't keep anything much on my laptop. Also, I use several computers, so a flash drive makes it easy to open docs on any computer. Have you ever gone on a trip, and brought the wrong computer, the one that did not have the files you needed? Keeping those files on a flash drive solves that problem, at least for me.

Interesting.
Let me know how your SSD works for you in the real world. I'm eventually going to take a trip around the world - "roughing it" through Europe, SE Asia maybe even Russia.
I am planning on getting a Panasonic Toughbook off eBay and fitting it with an SSD. I'm not sure if I will run Windows 7 Pro or Ubuntu on it.