I thoroughly enjoyed your “iPad Can Bridge a Gap” blog and video.

Your last comment, “People with disabilities will never be a market with huge buying power…” prompted me to respond.

There are numerous people with a variety of disabilities throughout the world. I have worked with marginalized populations for fifteen years. From my observations, people with disabilities are and will become a market with huge buying power, precisely because, “the trend towards accessible, simple products is making the world a more welcoming place, and the classroom more inclusive.” The work world is also becoming a more welcoming place and inclusive.

My work as a Customized Employment Specialist to find work for people with disabilities, particularily people with developmental disabilities, to train those individuals at their places of employment, has provided me with valuable insight.

Most individuals on my caseload own and operate; a cell phone, iphones, ipods, computers, DVD’s, etc. Their skills translate well on resumes and into positions of employment. Employees are also consumers and will purchase more of what provides them opportunities to enjoy life. There is a market.

Providing opportunities is the greatest point of access for any individual to fulfill their potential at home, work or play. Say “yes” to Scotty as much as possible in respect to permitting him to play with your digital equipment, to learn, to expore, to create more opportunities for himself, at home and perhaps where he will work one day.

Warm regards,

Dana L. Miller

I did try putting a Parallels VM on the SSD. It was a 20GB Windows XP VM that I use as a dev environment for some applications that run on Windows. I didn’t notice too much difference at all, and I went back to using the VM on my hard drive. It’s obviously better in some ways to keep VMs on a SSD, but I think that benefit was countered by having the VM and OSX on the same drive, maxing out the I/O.

That said, I think you would notice significant improvement putting your VMs on a SSD, separating the I/O from your OS – but that’s just my prediction.

Another option for you is an optical drive replacement available here. I may do that as well in the future since I can’t remember the last time I needed my DVD drive.

I have a Unibody 17″ (current rev), with 8 Gigs RAM, a 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, and an upgraded WD Scorpio Black 7200 RPM 320 Gig drive. So it is already as fast as you can get without an SSD.

Therefore, instead of switching the boot drive over to the SSD, I think I might first experiment with putting Parallels and all my Windows VMs on the SSD. That is the main area I would like to speed up, and I have read elsewhere it makes a big difference.

Please share your Parallels performance results if you do move them to the SSD.