Someone was asking about SSD drive upgrades in a comment thread; I just took a bit of a risk and tried the OCZ Apex Series 120GB inside my two-ish year old MacBook Pro.

You want the short summary? It works. And how: the machine boots in a shade over 4 seconds.

The detail is where the devil lives, of course. This wasn’t a full test, by any means – i got a recommendation from a mate and thought the risk worth taking: I wanted to extend the life of the trusty MacBook but if it turned out the whole idea was a non-starter I could always use the SSD in a more mainstream laptop, and I wanted to see if the claimed advances in flash architecture really did make the whole concept more usable. Well, that and a conversation with the guys at Overclockers who instantly categorised all the cheaper options by a four-letter word rhyming with “trap”. But then, vendors with new expensive things to sell often do that…

Anyway, the details are varied but none are that unpleasant. Getting inside a MacBook Pro is not what I would call easy: there’s three different lengths of screw, two different heads (one a Torx T6 – not often found) and a couple of stages where you find yourself levering away at a bit of bendy metal alloy, grimacing like mad waiting for the loud CRACK. One type of CRACK indicates the right bits have sprung loose; the other indicates that the touchpad might not work again.

The only action I had to take which was peculiar to my choice of SSD replacement unit, and my use of the MacBook, was in reformatting the SSD. As delivered, it’s an NTFS/MBR single partition. For the Mac I needed 2 HFS+ partitions and a GUID based partition table. Changing over a storage device is easy in theory: click on the right bits of the Disk Utility in OSX and the job’s done. In practice, doing it to a device which is really a RAID0 array internally, arbitrated by its own onboard processor, is a little bit more nerve-wracking.

But you’re reading these words so you know it worked. For Apple people, the procedure I used was to change the MacBook’s startup volume to an external bootable firewire drive that has Leopard Server on it. Then I used SuperDuper to back up the boot volume to the spare space on the external drive, did the hardware swap, SuperDuper’ed the boot partition back to the SSD, and then changed startup disk back to the internal volume again.

Part of the reason why this isn’t the basis for a whole article in the mag is that, as with our infamous printer-ink sunlight fade test, the first week of use is no guide to later weeks. What’s more, there’s a huge variability in the nature, quality, performance and even life-cycle of Flash storage – the fact that any SSD looks like a disk volume is not because they are architected that way, but rather because there’s a storage processor flipping your bits around like billy-o behind the scenes, while trying to tell you that there’s nothing to see.

So I’m going to hold on my final verdict, and give only an interim thumbs up. Battery life is better by about 30% (though the battery use meter has gone nuts, so that’s only my estimate). The palm-rest with the SSD under it is a bit warmer than it was with a hard drive. Overall performance is massively faster, and I suppose theoretically, drop resistance is hugely better too. Though I’m not testing that!