Day two. Time to roll up your nerd sleeves and get dirty. Incase you missed Monday’s post, this is a follow up to our guide to upgrading your existing machine to an solid state hard drive. Installation time of course will vary depending on your machine, comfortability, and tools. For this any many other installations, I have found the guides at iFixit to be extremely handy, as well as their very affordable 54 Piece Bit Driver Kit. As always, before attempting any major hardware install, it’s always a good idea to make sure you have a good backup. My personal recommendations on OSX tend to be either Time Machine, CarbonCopyCloner, or an old favorite SuperDuper. (All free!)
Once you have found your appropriate guide take your time. Keep a careful eye on the order in which you remove the screws, as they can vary in shape and size. Remember your main goal at the end, no “spare” parts for the “Jar of Shame”. Hopefully your machine is a bit cleaner, but once you crack open your machine, it may look something like:
Typically we would normally proceed by removing the existing SATA drive in the unit above, and simply replacing it with our new SSD as they are the same size. The mounting screws in most cases is the only additional part you must remove from the SATA drive and screw into your SSD in order for it to rest properly. In our testing though we’re going to take a more “scenic” route and leave our SATA drive right where it is. (During this test we also ran into issues when reversing the drive placement). That’s when we introduce the Optibay from MCE.
This little piece of magic will be what we use to install our solid state drive. This method also assumes that you have very little use for your super drive. But not to worry. Part of the kit from MCE includes an external USB Superdrive enclosure. Thus making it convenient for just those occasions when you may need to reinstall OSX or Final Cut.
Once the “dirty” work is complete, it’s time to pop in your OSX disk in your new external usb super drive. As the computer boots, hold down the option key in order to receive a list of choices the computer can boot to. Choose your OSX installation disk and perform a typical install. HINT: If you’ve settled on a smaller, more affordable SSD drive, now may be the time to customize the installation to excluded various language translations and unused printer drivers. We will also review how was can do this POST OS installation. Do don’t worry if you chose not to do this initially.
Congratulations you made it! Get ready to be amazed that first time you fire up your (it will seem new) machine. It by far will be one of the most significant upgrades that you actually notice day to day. But if you’re working on a smaller SSD, there are a few things we can do to optimize our disk usage and reduce our OS footprint. The first of which may be self explanatory, but we want to make sure we keep our operating system and applications on our solid state drive, and our media and other content on the SATA. Second, if you didn’t optimize your install from the get go, there are a few tools to help you in the post.
Monolingual is a great tool to free up space by removing unneeded language translations, input menus, and architectures. Keep in mind however, that anything you remove will more than likely only be restorable via a reinstallation (archive and install) of OSX. Further, removing particular architectures may result in applications not functioning if they relied on those architectures. In addition to these tools, Omnidisksweeper is a great app that displays which files/folders are taking up the most space on your system. And like many of the other recommendations it’s a free tool. You’ll notice printers taking up their fair share of space when analyzing your drive. Feel free to remove the unnecessary drivers to save even more space.
Now it’s time to get really geeky. Benchmarks. We already went over the noticible difference at startup, but how does it break down numerically in comparison to the SATA. And what difference was there (if any) between our Mushkin and OCZ SSD? To administer the tests we used a few different tools including iBench and QuickBench. Our overall iBench score was as follows for reference:
In conclusion, it’s easy to see the write speed performances from the graphs is through the roof, especially in comparison to our now sluggish SATA friend. Cutting boot time in half is also another big advantage for those wanting to make the switch. Installing an SSD drive in your machine can make you fall back in love with your computer, whether you enjoy opening every single application at once with no spinning beachballs, or just want a lightning fast system. And, as we found out, we don’t have to sacrifice storage space in order to make the plunge affordably.
Special thanks to both Mushkin and OCZ for providing their amazing drives to iSource for this article.
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