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!

These guys decided that the only way to ensure their personal data stayed personal was to smelt down their hard disks into ingots of aluminium. You can’t fault their logic; it’s incredibly unlikely that anything could be recovered from the platters, but you have to wonder just what was on them to warrant all that effort.

Right now, my hard disk contains;

- A spreadsheet listing all my finances
- A PDF of last year’s tax return
- Private emails
- Bank statements
- Saved passwords to a lot of web services
- Potentially embarrassing pictures from that night in the pub last week

Despite this, I’ll be happy to give them a quick format or two and throw them in the bin when their time comes. You see, I just don’t think I’m interesting enough to pique the interest of any passing data recovery experts.

Of course, if you do have national security secrets, plans for a time machine, a cure for the common cold or something of that nature on a hard disk that you need to throw out, then you could always invest in a commercial product like the Hard Disk Crusher from EDR, which squashes disks into cubes like cars at a scrapyard.

However, hard disks can be more resistant to impacts than you may believe. Earlier this year a hard disk from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster was found, and data recovery experts managed to save the results of an experiment which were previously thought to have been lost forever. If a drive can survive an explosion and a fall from tens of thousands of feet in the air, then who knows if it will survive a good crushing?

You could consider drafting in some outside help, from the friendly local train operator, for instance. These security-conscious computer users placed their hard disk on train tracks and waited for a freight train to take care of erasing data.

If you’re based in the US then you can always try shooting your hard disk – it seems to work very well with a .223 caliber sniper rifle, according to YouTube user tbonesixtynine. Of course, thanks to the UK’s slightly more stringent laws on gun ownership this isn’t an option open to most PC Pro readers.

Another plan would be to lend it to David Bayon, PC Pro peripherals editor, who can destroy hardware simply by picking it up and looking at it.