• This is the review from September 2008 sold me on the Intels.
• This review from March 2009 revisits the state of SSD's.
• This article addresses the fix Intel issued for the slowdown of the drives over time.
• Linus Torvalds on the Intel X25-M: "That thing absolutely rocks."

Update: August 30th, 2009

• AnandTech updates their SSD review with the G2 version of the X25-M

My MacBook is not my main computer. After loading up my MacBook with the OS and apps, I still have about 45GB remaining on the drive. For day-to-day use this is plenty of space. If I ever go on trips or need more space I will simply attach a 2.5" drive in a small external enclosure. I think this is workable even if you use the MB as your desktop. If you have a unibody Macbook you can also look into the Optibay for additional storage – http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

Snow Leopard will reclaim a few GB of space to use for storage over Leopard.

On the Mac Pro the SSD is attached to the SATA bus in the lower CD/DVD bay, which still leaves open the four drive bays in the computer for data storage. The drive is simply laying on the shelf where the DVD drive would go. I do leave my mail on the SSD drives since it only takes up a few GBs of space and makes mail very fast. Everything else goes on a regular hard drive.

Now that the 80GB X25-M can be had for under $300 it's a viable solution considering what it brings to your system in terms of speed and reliability.

I'm truly sold on the SSD's. They make the computer lightning fast compared to a traditional hard drive. If you are not sold yet on the speed, see the little video I made.

Until now.

Installing Leopard on the MacBook has been a mixed bag. While I appreciate the user improvements of Leopard, especially Spaces, my MacBook has been far less stable on Leopard. I've had many, many kernel panics under Leopard. Under Tiger my MacBook was very stable. In contrast, my main computer, a dual 1.8 GHz G5, has been rock solid for its entire life running Panther, Tiger and Leopard, with freezes and kernel panics being very rare.

It's likely those kernel panics on the MacBook finally caught up with me. AppleMail has been flaky on my MacBook for a long time. Mail finally refused to load and quit responding. Several force quits later I decided to restart the MacBook. It would try to load and reboot automatically. It was caught in this loop.

A boot into single user mode was my next step, hoping that an fsck on the file system would fix the problem. fsck could not repair the problem. I had read that three times in a row did the trick for others, but not for me. The message "keys out of order" was the glaring error message.

Disk Utility was of no help either.

I did have a fairly recent Carbon Copy Clone of the system but I thought it was worth trying to copy off some recent stuff first using target disk mode in case I had to reformat the disk. I got a warning message when trying to mount this volume, but it did mount. Next I tried to run fsck from the desktop. That failed too.

Carbon Copy Cloner also failed several times on this volume.

Time to bite the bullet and download DiskWarrior. I somehow eluded needing this program up until now. A few weeks earlier my work PowerBook could only be brought back to life with the help of DiskWarrior. It was a $100 gamble but seemingly worth the risk.

With the MacBook in target disk mode on my G5 I ran DiskWarrior. It found a bunch of errors and corrected them. My MacBook booted just fine after that.

Happy endings!

It will be interesting to see if the MacBook continues to have kernel panics now I have my filesystem in good working order.