Black late-08 Macbook (2.16, 2gb) with an older, cheap Kensington SSD. It’s a god send.
I can boot up, start traktor, finish the consistency check, and be ready to play inside 10 or 15 seconds. It’s worth only having 64GB of space (didn’t have money for more).
One thing you do need to know is that SSDs still have some issues related to small-file write speed degrading over time. It doesn’t seem to be a huge deal for playing, but it’s screwed up some recordings for me in the past. The short-term solution is a freespace wipe (overwrite with 0s in Disk Utility is fine), though that’s just a bandaid. Expect to do a full wipe, reinstall, restore from backup about once a year or so, and you’ll be fine. Or just record to an external if it’s in really bad shape.
If you keep a clone of the OS X install disk on an external hard drive instead of using the physical DVD then it doesn’t take more than a few hours to do the whole thing. Just keep a clone image of the DVD on a separate partition on your backup drive…you can boot off it and an intelligent install (ignoring useless language packs and printer drivers) takes like 20 minutes. Restoring my drive from Time Machine takes less than an hour. The longest part is over-writing the disk with zeros, which you can do from Disk Utility after booting the image of the OS X install disk you keep on your backup drive. If your SSD comes with a utility to do a low-level format…it probably works better, but I haven’t had problems with just overwriting with zeros.
I need to get around to doing that to mine at some point in the next few weeks…been using too many freespace wipe bandaids…been lazy.
Oh, and don’t listen to people who claim that SSD’s lifespan isn’t long enough. Yeah, they have a limited life span. Because of the way they work, there is a finite limit to the number of times data can be written to/read from each little piece of memory. In practice…you’ll throw away an SSD long before it matters. The guys I know who do solid state physics and can do the math/science that proves why that happens use SSDs. If you want details, I can get them from primary sources…so can google. In this case, the alarmists are wrong.
(Disclaimer: IHNFC if making an image of a paid copy of OS X counts as piracy. I don’t care. That’s how they do it in the Apple store, and it saves way too much time not to do it. If somehow it is considered piracy and it came down to it, I’d take Apple to court over it.)
Edit: I forgot about it, but jimbob’s other advantage is right. I’ve dropped my laptop–while it was running–upwards of 10 feet off a stage. Apart from eventually getting Apple to give me new top case just because I wanted one (cosmetic damage near the cd slot), everything was fine. I’m not 100% convinced that stopping platters and moving heads off of them while the computer was in freefall would have worked as well as just not having moving parts.