I picked up a Crucial m4 256GB SSD as a second internal drive for my 2011 iMac 27″ with 12GB of RAM, the factory 1TB hard drive, and OSX 10.8.3. The SSD is now my boot drive, with all my applications and user folders on it as well. Performance is excellent — apps (Pages, Word, Excel, Photoshop, iPhoto, iMovie, etc.) all start immediately, and I can run whatever apps I want simultaneously. It just works.

Before installation, I made sure I had a Time Machine backup (on a Synology NAS) and a backup on CrashPlan’s servers. I used the SATA cable and installation tools from OWC, and followed OWC’s awesome installation video, below. The SSD mounts inside the machine using foam sticky tape just behind the DVD drive.

After installing this drive, I used SuperDuper to replicate the stock “Macintosh HD” volume to the SSD, then used System Preferences –> Startup Disk to change my startup disk to the SSD. I also picked up the app TRIM Enabler, and turned on TRIM support. Upon rebooting, I also unmounted the Macintosh HD volume using Disk Utility, just to make sure I wasn’t accidentally using files on that volume. After a few days of using the new SSD and verifying I have no problems, I will erase the original Macintosh HD volume and use it for whatever.

256GB is plenty for the OS, my apps, and docs. But it is not sufficient to include my photos, music, and movies. All that stuff is on external drives anyway, so I didn’t have to worry about that.

This is also posted as an Amazon review.