After toying with the Seagate 500GB hard drive in my MacBook Pro for about 6 weeks, I realized that I needed an even faster drive to push through my photo and video projects. After conducting a ton of research and grieving over the expense, I decided to ‘invest’ in the Corsair P128 CMFSSD-128GBG2D at newegg.com.
There were two things that really sold me on the Corsair P128: the 220MB/s read and 200MB/s write speeds and the 128MB cache. The read/write speeds are near top of the line for SSDs. The Corsair’s 128MB cache is simply staggering compared to the average 8MB or 16MB cache on standard laptop hard drives (16MB cache for the 500GB Seagate).
The P128 is the exact length, height and width as the 500GB Seagate. The P128, however, is much, much lighter.
Here are some simple before and afters:
| Action or Test Run | Seagate 500GB | Corsair P128 | Improvement | |
| Startup to Desktop, Quicksilver & NewsFire | 80 seconds | 34 seconds | 2.3x | |
| Photoshop CS4 | 16 seconds | 6 seconds | 2.6x | |
| Firefox 3.5 | 8 seconds | 4 seconds | 2.0x | |
| Word/Excel 2008 | 11 seconds | 4 seconds | 2.7x | |
| 4 seconds | 3 seconds | 1.3x | ||
| Random Read (4k) | 0.60 MB | 16.19 MB | 26.9x | |
| Random Write (4k) | 1.18 MB | 12.30 MB | 10.4x |
Here’s the P128 getting mounted in the drive bay:
Dropping from 500GB storage was a bit of a mental hurdle, but I really value speed over size. That’s what external drives are for.
After a few days using the P128, I’m very satisfied. The price still makes me wince, though. Ouch.
awesome! how much?
I got it when there was a very generous rebate offer, but it’s now priced around $345. Newegg.com is the place to get it if you’re ready to buy.
Hi, nice review, is macbook rise the temperature?
Hi Burak. No, the temperatures did not rise. In fact, they were reduced by about 20°F. My MBP says cool all day no matter what processes I’m running.
I bought Corsair p256. The shipping now. I’ll say that when it comes to their test results.
Hello. i have a few questions regarding your upgrade. personally, i also value speed over size, so upgrading to an ssd is a no brainer. i have a early 2008 macbook pro, non-unibody. so my questions are:
how difficult was it to replace your 500gb drive to an ssd?
how did you handle the information transfer from the first drive to the new drive? did you reinstall OSX and your programs or did you clone your ssd? if you did a hard reinstall of osx from the recovery discs, how would you go about partitioning the drive into the journal standard. what i cant visualize is after i remove the old drive with all my information on it and install the ssd, the new drive is basically blank and not formatted into any standard like journal or fat32, so how exactly would i cope with this? basically, the thought of installing the ssd and going to boot the laptop with nothing showing up is scaring me a lot, so if you can provide some tips on how i should go about this it would really be helpful. i am also buying the p256 since my old hd is also 256gb, that way i will have the same size, just faster!!
Hi, great post!
I’m considering getting this exact drive as well.
What model MacBook Pro do you have?
Thanks!
Hi Pedro,
I don’t normally tell people to hold off on buying things like this awesome SSD, but in this case I’m going to advise you to hold out just a little longer.
Earlier this week I spoke to someone at Corsair about my SSD. In that conversation, I was told that in the next 3-4 weeks Corsair is going to be announcing and releasing the updated version of this drive. It’ll have newer firmware and will handle certain processes and data loads with even greater efficiency.
If it wasn’t for the updated drives coming soon, I’d tell you to buy now and enjoy. But if you wait just a little bit, you’ll probably be even happier. According to Corsair, anyway. Just my two rubles worth of 2nd hand advice…
Jason
P.S. I’m using the 17″ 2.66GHZ MacBook Pro these days. Great machine.
Cool! Thanks a lot!
And yes what a great machine, indeed
I asked about it because of the situation with the 15” MBPs.
It seems that after the initial batch (the one with the expresscard board like the 17”) they were downgraded to a “not quite” 3Gb/s SATA II bus.
Thanks again for the reply!
Hey Pedro,
I was under the impression that the MBP’s downgraded SATA speeds were resolved with a firmware update. Even without the full SATA 3Gbps rates, the SSD card has a 220MB/s rate, and that’s still under the 3Gbps spec. If you use Google to calculate the transfer speeds (Google 220MB/s in Gbps) of the Corsair SSD, you’ll see that it’s roughly 1.7 Gbps. It’s fast, but it’s not 3Gbps fast, you know?
Jason
Did put the same disk in mid-2008 MBP (Penryn 2,4)=> it starts in 22s with Firefox & Itunes in cache while it made it in 46s with a 320go Momentus 7200rpm.
The upgrade wasn’t that hard to do: it takes 30mn, in a quiet room and a camera (to take shots step by step not to loose anything while rebuilding the MBP). Peaceful and zen is the key!
I used a white A4 paper to simulate the MBP and put all the screws around or on it at the place it was on the MBP. It helps.
I reformated it for Mac (Guild partition) with 10.6.2 and did 2 partitions on it: one for system (45go) which I did clone it with carbonclonecopy, the other one for storage purpose (Itunes library on it).
Now I can clone the system disk pretty easily and quick (15mn) whenever needed, especially if it slows down too much in the future (no trim).
I ran Xbench (I know its not the best, but…) and got a 150 vs 50 at disk test vs my old 7200 Momentus. Only point, at write speed for big files (like divx movie for example) it never got over 70 Mo/s in real world. It scores at random 4ko files write and read: 9mo to 12 mo/s vs not even 1,5mo/s with Momentus.
Its very fast at starting computer and launching apps. Absolutely silent too (I love that). I did not notice special battery improvement (maybe some but too small to be noticed). Heat seems better.
This P128 works well: I originally bought the X128, replaced it twice for it did not work at all.
Got good support from Corsair customer service.