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I love my 13" MacBook Pro, especially after I upgraded it to 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, installed a 128 GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD system drive in the place there the…
SuperDrive used to be and replace the HDD with a 1 TB WD Scorpio Blue.
Where did you get the kit for putting the SSD in the optical drive slot? Did you get one of the kits that comes with an enclosure for the SuperDrive? If so, did you need software like the kind that comes with this kit, store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PR..., to get DVD player to recognize the external drive?
I bought a kit on eBay that included both a caddy to mount a hdd or ssd in the optical bay and an external enclosure. I bought it from a seller namned "it-glasses" but he does not appear to be active at the moment.
The caddy looks like this one:
cgi.ebay.com/SATA-2ND-Hard-Drive-HDD-caddy-adapter...
and the enclosure looks like this one:
cgi.ebay.com/USB-EXTERNAL-CASE-Enclosure-SATA-12-7...
I paid about $50 for the lot including shipping.
One negative thing with having the DVD in an external enclosure is that is uses both USB ports to make sure the drive get enough current.
The DVD Player can be fixed by replacing every occurrence of the string "Internal" with the string "External", look here for the details:
hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2010020812084...
By installing the SSD in the optical bay you have the option to install a 12.5 mm drive in the ordinary HDD bay, like the 1 TB WD Scorpio Blue for example. The optical bay only have room for drives with a height of 9.5 mm or less.
The caddy looks like this one:
cgi.ebay.com/SATA-2ND-Hard-Drive-HDD-caddy-adapter...
and the enclosure looks like this one:
cgi.ebay.com/USB-EXTERNAL-CASE-Enclosure-SATA-12-7...
I paid about $50 for the lot including shipping.
One negative thing with having the DVD in an external enclosure is that is uses both USB ports to make sure the drive get enough current.
The DVD Player can be fixed by replacing every occurrence of the string "Internal" with the string "External", look here for the details:
hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2010020812084...
By installing the SSD in the optical bay you have the option to install a 12.5 mm drive in the ordinary HDD bay, like the 1 TB WD Scorpio Blue for example. The optical bay only have room for drives with a height of 9.5 mm or less.
I have a question for you. How did the SSD and the extra RAM benefit you in day to day and heavy use? I'm planning on buying better RAM, but the SSD is a LOT of money since I won't have two drives like you, and I need something around 320GB. Thanks, if you could help me out that'd be great!
I did the upgrade in steps so I can tell you that the RAM upgrade from 4GB to 8GB did't do much for "normal" use. Sometimes I have 3 or for virtual machines running in VMware Fusion and then the benefits of more RAM is very clear, with 4GB the computer was very sluggish but with 8GB the impact from the virtual machines are minimal.
One thing that also improved with more RAM is shutdown speed, closing a lot of application can take very long time on Mac OS X but with 8GB this is done a lot quicker.
The performance benefits from using a SSD as a system drive is much greater, the computer boots in 4 seconds (from the computer starts reading from the disk, about 15 seconds in total), applications starts in a second and the overall feeling is much nicer.
If you need 320GB of storage using only an SSD is really expensive. Using a SSD as a system drive and a HDD for media is a great solution but you are giving up the internal optical drive...
I have placed the folders for Movies, Music and Pictures on the HDD and created symbolic links to these folders from my home folder to make everything look as usual. With that setup a 64GB SSD is enough for most users.
An alternative if you don't want to give up the optical drive is to replace the HDD with a hybrid drive, for example the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB.
One thing that also improved with more RAM is shutdown speed, closing a lot of application can take very long time on Mac OS X but with 8GB this is done a lot quicker.
The performance benefits from using a SSD as a system drive is much greater, the computer boots in 4 seconds (from the computer starts reading from the disk, about 15 seconds in total), applications starts in a second and the overall feeling is much nicer.
If you need 320GB of storage using only an SSD is really expensive. Using a SSD as a system drive and a HDD for media is a great solution but you are giving up the internal optical drive...
I have placed the folders for Movies, Music and Pictures on the HDD and created symbolic links to these folders from my home folder to make everything look as usual. With that setup a 64GB SSD is enough for most users.
An alternative if you don't want to give up the optical drive is to replace the HDD with a hybrid drive, for example the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB.
Would this be an easy and compatible switch for the 13" MacBook Pro?
I you mean installing a hybrid harddrive, yes, it's very easy you need a Philips #00 and a T6 Torx screwdriver, it's a 10 minute job.
Here is a video showing the improved bootup speed:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkdKBw0LCF0
Here is a video showing the improved bootup speed:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkdKBw0LCF0
