Some time ago I did an SSD hard drive upgrade to my aging Mid 2012 MacBook Pro. I threw out the original Toshiba 750gig drive for a speedy Kingston 240gb SSD. The speed boost was extreme, but that was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was how quiet the laptop got. Totally, absolutely, dead quiet. When not performing any cooling fan agitating tasks of course.

But 240gb is also a pretty hefty downgrade from the original 750, so this past week I bought myself an optibay drive enclosure to reinstall the 750gb hard drive in lieu of the DVD-rom. The task itself is pretty easy, a few screws here, a few more there, and twenty minutes later I was all done with a grand total of 1 terabyte of drive space on my MacBook.

One catch though. My computer got loud. I didn’t think of it this way before. I’ve had the original hard drive in this machine for 3 years before the upgrade and I thought that it was pretty damn quiet at that time. But swapping over to the SSD spoiled me in ways I didn’t know were possible. My MacBook become really fast and responsive. It shed a few ounces, too. But really, and perhaps most importantly, it got super quiet. So quiet in fact, that my dual drive setup lasted for exactly ten minutes before the hard drive noise bugged me enough to throw it out again. Can’t do it. I want to write something clever like “once you go SSD, you never….” but nothing rhymes with SSD the way it rhymes with “black” in that other version.

Basically I just sacrificed 750gb of space for the convenience of super low decibel level at my fingertips. I’ll get a USB 3.0 enclosure for that other drive for sure, but I never thought things would turn out this way. I ended up closing up the laptop with no optibay at all, no hard drive nor DVD-rom, and I can only imagine one scenario under which it will go back in: another SSD.