Media professionals are always looking for the latest and greatest hardware. Most consumers, however, concentrate solely on RAW CPU power when, in fact, they may be better served by looking into smarter storage solutions instead. After all, it may be that old hard drive that’s holding back your digital workflow.

Therefore, this three-part series will examine some of the best hardware upgrades for your media storage. We are going to use a 2006 Mac Pro to demonstrate the upgrades, but you should be able to achieve similar results on any iMac or PC.

Kicking off this series is the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD (solid state drive) to improve the overall speed of our system.

Boot Drive – OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD

There are a quite a few drives when it comes to choosing the right SSD for your system. We decided to try out the Mercury Extreme Pro SSD from Other World Computing because it’s supposed to very fast while also being one of the most affordable drives out there. It also uses the highly acclaimed SandForce Processor which should help prevent write speed degradation commonly experienced by SSD’s.

Installation:

Installation of the SSD was a breeze. Its’ very similar to installing any other (mechanical) hard drive. The Extreme Pro comes in a 2.5″ form factor, however, so you’ll have to place it into an adapter to fit it into any of the 3.5″ Mac Pro slots. Other World Computing recommends the Icy Dock adapter. You can also install the SSD into the second optical drive bay if you own a Mac Pro 2008 or later. Unfortunately, this isn’t easily achievable on the 2006 model, since the optical bay isn’t wired with SATA connectors.

The Icy Dock adapter will convert any 2.5inch SSD into a 3.5inch compatible hard drive.

I actually recommend purchasing a 2.5″ SSD over an 3.5″ alternative, even if you’re planning on installing the drive into a desktop computer. A 2.5″ drive will give you the flexibility to also install it into a MacBook Pro down the road, for example. These drives aren’t cheap so flexibility is a good thing!

Performance:

Other World Computing promises “Ultra High-Performance” compared to mechanical hard drives. To test this claim we’ve set up an exact mirror image of our boot drive on the Extreme Pro SSD as well as on a 7200rpm drive from Seagate for a side by side comparison.

In our sequential, uncached speed test the Mercury Extreme Pro achieved write speeds of 155MB/s and read speeds of 199MB/s. That’s compared to 60MB/s write and 62/MB read speeds on our 7200 Barracuda drive. The difference was even more dramatic in our random, uncached speed test. 152MB/s write and 192MB/s read vs. 23MB/s write and 26MB/s read speeds. It even topped the SSD in the newly released MacBook Air which peaked at 126MB/s write and 113/MB/s read. The Mercury Extreme Pro’s overall Xbench score of 324 points destroyed the mechanical hard drive which only scored 38 points. The MacBook Air SSD was able to scoop up 248 points.

Those are the bare numbers, however, which I’m usually not a big fan of. I find it much more interesting to note how upgrades actually affect daily user operations. And let me tell you; the perceived speed enhancements from upgrading your boot drive to the Mercury Extreme Pro are amazing. Applications—even large ones such as Adobe After Effects and Apple’s Aperture—open almost instantaneously. No dock-bouning. No hard drive noise. No wait. The system boots within seconds—compared to minutes—while day to day operations simply feel snappier.

A quick boot tests demonstrates how dramatic the difference between SSD and mechanical hard drive will actually feel in a real world situation. For this test we booted OSX 10.6.5 with Photoshop CS5, Illustrator CS5, After Effects CS5, Microsoft Word 2011, Chrome 5, and Firefox 4 set to auto launch. Take a look at the video below for a side-by-side comparison:

If you couldn’t stand sitting through the above video (can’t blame you) here’s the quick and dirty summary: the Mercury Extreme Pro SSD booted in 27 seconds from start to finish compared to 3 minutes and 21 seconds for the mechanical drive. That’s a real life improvement by 7.5x!

I doubt that any graphics card update, that extra 0.13GHz of CPU power, or even an additional 2GB of RAM would be able to impact your system on such a dramatic scale;; at least not in terms of day-to-day usage. An SSD upgrade will be noticed even with the most common tasks.

File Management – Limited Storage

There’s no question that this drive is fast. Unfortunately, all SSD’s come with a caveat: limited storage space.

For our test we chose the 120GB model—minuscule compared to the latest drives in the mechanical hard drive world. And while OWC does offer drives with up to 480GB of storage the cost ($1579.99) is most likely prohibitive for all but the most extreme users out there. And even then, it still can’t compare to a Western Digital drive with two ($90) or three terabytes ($260).

Hence, we currently can’t recommend the Mercury Extreme Pro—or any SSD for that matter—as a storage solution. Instead we recommend using it exclusively as a boot drive while moving most of your media to external drives, or in the case of the Mac Pro, to one of its internal hard drives.

Many websites go as far as recommending you to move your entire user folder to a mechanical hard drive. And while there are many tutorials to make this change, I recommend against it. The reason is simple: only files that are stored on your SSD will actually benefit from the speed improvements. Therefore, you want to keep as many of your system files as possible on the SSD, while moving your large media files to a mechanical hard drive.

Here’s our recommendation for getting the most out of your Mercury Extreme Pro:

Keep your OSX installation files, user folders, and applications on the Mercury Extreme Pro. Snow Leopard’s footprint is fairly small, so this shouldn’t be a problem with a 120GB SSD. You can free up additional space by deselecting unneeded languages and printer drivers during the OSX installation.

You should definitely consider moving your iTunes, iPhoto, and Aperture libraries off of your SSD, however. Yes, this will prevent fast access to those media files, but let’s face it: you simply don’t have 3TB of SSD storage at your exposure. (We will take a look at speeding up your media drive in the second part of this series.)

Fortunately, moving your iTunes, iPhoto, and Aperture libraries couldn’t be easier. First, drag your iTunes media folder, as well as your iPhoto and Aperture libraries to a new location on your media drive. Then open iTunes, iPhoto, or Aperture—while holding down the option key—and point the programs to the new location. Done!

Option-click iPhoto to invoke this dialogue box.

In addition, I also recommend creating a ‘documents’ folder on your media drive with a shortcut placed in the finder sidebar. That way you’ll always have easy access to the new location.

In my opinion this workflow will offer you a healthy balance of disk speed and space utilization.

Conclusion – What Are You Waiting For?

After reading this review, it shouldn’t surprise you that I’m a big fan of OWC’s Mercury Extreme Pro SSD. It’s blazingly fast, easy to install, and competitively priced. At $259—for the 120GB model—this may be the single best upgrade you’ll ever make to your aging computer system. If you’re tired of spinning beach balls, and stalling launch times, you should definitely give the Mercury Extreme SSD a try. It was definitely love at first boot for me.

The Mercury Extreme Pro SSD is available directly from Other World Computing. Available models range from 40GB for $99 up to 480GB for $1579.99. For the purpose of a boot-drive we can highly recommend the 120GB option for $295.99.