Putting an SSD in my MacBook Pro
I decided to dip my toes into the SSD waters, however I was not ready to outlay more than a few hundred dollars yet. So I decided to go the hybrid route of having both a solid state and a spinning disk. This meant getting rid of my optical drive. Luckily, there are kits to do this. I purchased a data doubler kit from OWC, picking the 120GB Mercury Electra 6G, even though my MBP only has a 3G SATA interface. My MBP is a mid 2010 model, the MacBook Pro 6,2.
The upgrade process is straightforward, although a little tedious. There’s about a dozen screws, and a few fragile ribbon cables that you don’t want to break. Unfortunately, I ended up doing the process twice. I initially removed the optical drive and mounted the SSD in its place. Unfortunately, OS X (or the hardware) does not appear to like for the SSD to be in this position on the SATA bus. Partitioning with Disk Utility would come up with errors and just general funkiness. Contacting OWC support confirmed my suspicion that I should have put the SSD where the HDD was, and move the HDD to the optical drive’s position. After taking things apart again, and moving things around, I haven’t encountered any issues.
In order to take advantage of the SSD, but aware of the size limitations, I decided to follow Matt Gemmell’s recommendations regarding arrangement of system & user directories. In my case, I’ve symlinked my Downloads, Movies, Pictures, and iTunes Media directories onto the HDD. I’ve kept my Desktop, Documents, Library and project workspaces on the SSD. After doing so, I’m still sitting at about 48GB free on the SSD. So far, it is working out great.
One thing I ran into today was the need to copy some photos off of an optical disc. We have other machines, so the obvious answer was to copy them from another machine. But I wanted to use the Remote Disc feature of OS X feature. However, it didn’t appear to be possible from my MBP. I enabled disc sharing on the remote mac, and ran the following commands, as found from a post on MacWorld:
playa:~ jay$ defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
playa:~ jay$ defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true
After this, I logged out and back into my account and a Remote Disc entry showed up in Finder. You may be able to just restart Finder as well to get it to show up. The Remote Disc feature then worked as I expected.
Having the SSD gives obvious performance boosts. The install of Lion took 6-7 minutes. Startups are considerably faster, as well as the time to login. Overall, it would be hard to go back. Hopefully the SSD does not fail, which is one reason (other than cost) that I put off doing this.
