On Friday, I joined the SSD club. That’s the Solid State Drive club, not the Special School District or the Social Security Disability clubs. I installed a OWC Mercury Electra 3G 240GB SSD in my Mid-2009 MacBook Pro to replace my never working DVD drive.

I purchased the kit that included the bracket (they call it a data doubler), the tools and the SSD:

Installation was easy, I used the video and the manual that came with it.

The only difficult part was reconnecting the plug that drives the screen. Here’s the final install:

I then installed the latest OS X Mountain Lion GM Seed, leaving the old Hard Drive unaffected. And attempted to use symbolic links for key folders, but certain applications, mostly sandboxed ones, failed to work across these links. Instead, I simply moved my iPhoto library, iTunes, VM’s and other big files to the root of the old HDD and left the rest on the SSD.

The old MacBook Pro now boots in seconds, not minutes. The old hard drive, a 500GB ST9500420ASG @ 7200rpm, runs at 32/36 Mb/s on a 1.5Gb/s line, the new SSD runs at 200/260 Mb/s on a 3Gb/s line (according to Blackmagic Disk Speed Test).

The new SSD is fast, just wow fast! The laptop now boots faster and launches Photoshop faster than the desktop Mac Pro. My Mid-2009 MacBook Pro just gained a few more years of useful life.