My Macbook Pro is coming up to its fourth birthday so I thought I’d celebrate the end of the OU course I’ve been doing by getting something faster and getting stuck into music again. Then I changed my mind and decided I’d try swapping out the hard disk for an SSD.

So – 270 quid later, an OCZ Vertex 2 (240GB) and a cheap ‘n cheerful external disk caddy arrived through the letterbox and crashed to the floor. Good job this thing has no moving parts I reckon.

After consulting the excellent ifixit – I put the new SSD in the caddy, rebooted the Mac with the option key down and installed a fresh copy of Lion onto the new SSD. Then restarted Lion from that and used Time Machine to get all my stuff onto it.

Checked it all seemed to be there – then swapped the disks over. Taking the lid of the Mac I have isn’t the easiest thing and getting the ribbon cable that’s glued to the top of the hard disk was a little daunting but turned out to be quite easy with the plastic cake mix spatula that came with the food processor. It’s meant for cleaning cake mix out of the bowl – has a sharpish plastic blade – worked a treat getting the cable off.

Anyway – how’s it working? It’s astonishing. Mail launches seemingly instantly. Everything does in fact. I’ve read various things about trim support and disabling last access time writes – but for now I think I’ll just leave it all as is.

And it’s noticeably quieter of course. And a lot cheaper than buying a new Macbook Pro.