A little while ago I was looking at my MacBook Pro, which is a 15 inch 1680×1050 Anti-Glare with a 500GB 7200 Hard drive and got the itch to tweak it out a little bit. I really wanted to try an SSD drive which I’ve heard so much about…..
Ok that’s a TOTAL lie… What really happened is that my wife needed a new desktop, and when I spec’d it out I made sure she had an SSD drive for the OS. I thought I could handle her having one and not me. TOTAL FAIL!
So I sprung for a SSD drive for my laptop. Actually I splurged and got one of the bigger “affordable” ones which is a 240GB Mercury drive from macsales.com. I told myself it had to be that big because I really wanted 2 of my notes VM’s to be on the SSD drive, but I KNEW that I couldn’t live with only a 240 GB hard drive. So rather then carrying an external USB drive with me – I had to sacrifice the optical drive and go for two hard drives – moving my original to the space where the optical was. Conveniently, macsales.com sells a special bracket to do just that.
Let me tell you. The hardware moves were EASY. Macsales had high quality videos show everything you needed to see.
What was difficult to me, was actually the OS. It seems on the Mac, if you want to install to a SSD in the boot drive, you better have a 10.6.4 OS disc. Earlier versions would not install in the boot drive. I ended up putting the SSD into my mac Pro and installed and updated it there. Was quite a pain actually. But it did work.
Am I happy with all this and the SSD?
Unbelievably so! I like that I can start a full Windows 7 VM in like 12 seconds. The mac apps are all but instant. It’s just a beautiful thing. And I ended up with more disc space then I started with. Do I miss the optical? Not really. I rarely use it. And even if i did get an install disc it’s easy to convert it to a DMG file.
So I truly think I’ve extended the life of my laptop until at LEAST Apple’s next refresh of the MacBook Pro line.
🙂