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Adding a SSD and moving old HDD.

R

ReedR95

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 5, 2010
6
0
Hi, I am running out of space on my Unibody MBP (June 2009 version). I just bought an OWC 120gb SSD, with the intention of putting it where my disk drive is, using their data doubler (which makes it fit). I want to use the SSD as my startup disk, but have heard that if you use the drive which is connected where the old disk drive used to be as the start up disk, there are problems with the computer waking from sleep, unless you turn off hibernation. So instead, I want to move my current hard drive to the disk drive slot, and put the SSD in the main slot. If I were to do this, would I need to do any "extra" configuring besides setting the SSD as my startup disk? After moving my harddrive to the disk drive slot, will it boot up normally, and then I can just add the SSD?

Thanks,
Reed
 
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As you mentioned in your post and as others have mentioned in these forums, you will most assuredly run into problems with sleep and hibernation if your SSD boot drive is sitting in the optical bay.

As for setting up your SSD, go ahead and install it in the main hard drive bay and move your HDD to the optical bay. When you boot up your machine, just hold down 'option' to select from the available bootable drives and from there you can boot into the os and configure the default startup disk.

Enjoy your SSD.
 
moving OSX

So If I want to use The new SSD as my start up disk, do I have to manually move OSX to that disk, or will just configuring it as my startup disk in system preferences take care of that for me?

Thanks for the help,
Reed
 
ReedR95 said:
So If I want to use The new SSD as my start up disk, do I have to manually move OSX to that disk, or will just configuring it as my startup disk in system preferences take care of that for me?

Thanks for the help,
Reed
Click to expand...
You can set it in once System Preferences and forget about it.
 
Curious what you are running where you are maxed out on the 120GB. I'm in a similar situation (had a '09 13, then sold and got my '10 13 - using same 120 GB OCZ). I go through it every month or so and clean out the junk I don't use.

Also, I used to have a 16GB SSD Hackintosh so I was very comfortable with cleaning out some of the junk that OS X comes with that I wasn't going to use (things like, extra drivers for video cards that obviously will never be installed in a laptop... 10 year old printer drivers...etc...)

I have my essential APPS installed, such as Adobe Creative Suite 5, Office '11, iLife '11, iTunes 10, iWork '09, iPhoto DB (which is 5 GB for me), Xcode, and a few apps such as utilities. I'm sitting @ 50 GB used.

I always transfer large files to my Time Capsule that I only access every so often. All my backups are always done to the Time Capsule as well.

Not to see this works for everyone, but I'm very careful about what I let sit on my SSD since the price per GB is still pretty high.
 
1BadMac said:
Curious what you are running where you are maxed out on the 120GB. I'm in a similar situation (had a '09 13, then sold and got my '10 13 - using same 120 GB OCZ). I go through it every month or so and clean out the junk I don't use.

Also, I used to have a 16GB SSD Hackintosh so I was very comfortable with cleaning out some of the junk that OS X comes with that I wasn't going to use (things like, extra drivers for video cards that obviously will never be installed in a laptop... 10 year old printer drivers...etc...)

I have my essential APPS installed, such as Adobe Creative Suite 5, Office '11, iLife '11, iTunes 10, iWork '09, iPhoto DB (which is 5 GB for me), Xcode, and a few apps such as utilities. I'm sitting @ 50 GB used.

I always transfer large files to my Time Capsule that I only access every so often. All my backups are always done to the Time Capsule as well.

Not to see this works for everyone, but I'm very careful about what I let sit on my SSD since the price per GB is still pretty high.
Click to expand...
I think the problem is that people have lazy with ever increasing disk drives. I've been doubling my internal laptop disk space usage every two years.

Now, with these SSDs space becomes an issue again. I think the ideal solution is to have both an internal SSD for speed and an HDD for space. This is actually pretty reasonable to pull off with any of the MBPs by simply removing the SuperDrive.

Life is too short to be worrying about disk space management all the time.:cool:
 
miata said:
Now, with these SSDs space becomes an issue again. I think the ideal solution is to have both an internal SSD for speed and an HDD for space. This is actually pretty reasonable to pull off with any of the MBPs by simply removing the SuperDrive.

Life is too short to be worrying about disk space management all the time.:cool:
Click to expand...

While I don't use the Superdrive daily, I use it enough to where I don't want to be w/o it just for having an extra HDD. With a lot of my computing being done in the cloud anyways, accessing my Time Capsule (which is 1TB + an additional USB outlet) is an easy option.

I estimate I spend about 5 minutes every month keeping my SSD organized and free of bloat (i.e. downloads I've already installed, run XSlimmer, Monolingual, clear browser cache, etc...).

To each is own. :)
 
1BadMac said:
While I don't use the Superdrive daily, I use it enough to where I don't want to be w/o it just for having an extra HDD. With a lot of my computing being done in the cloud anyways, accessing my Time Capsule (which is 1TB + an additional USB outlet) is an easy option.

I estimate I spend about 5 minutes every month keeping my SSD organized and free of bloat (i.e. downloads I've already installed, run XSlimmer, Monolingual, clear browser cache, etc...).

To each is own. :)
Click to expand...
How do you access the files on your Time Capsule when you are away from home?
 
1BadMac said:
http://gigaom.com/apple/access-your-time-capsule-over-the-internet/
Click to expand...
Seems pretty straight forward for about 2% of the population.

I've actually been getting into minimization. If I get my "core disk" down to size it is all that much easier to protect and recover the data in case of a system loss or failure.

My point is that people don't want to have to think about that kind of stuff -- and they haven't had to until now. I guess the idea is that the rest of the folks will do everything on MobileMe, DropBox, or one of the other fairly turn-key cloud storage solutions.

I have a Verizon phone with essentially free WIFI Hotspot (Palm Pixi Plus), but I still like the idea of having all my stuff on my laptop. The one time I'll want to access the cloud will be when I'm on a plane that does nto have WIFI access.
 
miata said:
My point is that people don't want to have to think...
Click to expand...

Yes, you are right. :) I forgot that when I post out here at times. I know a Mac is supposed to be about "simplicity", but is it too much to ask that people know some basic networking? :p

miata said:
I guess the idea is that the rest of the folks will do everything on MobileMe, DropBox, or one of the other fairly turn-key cloud storage solutions.
Click to expand...

I don't want to pay additional for MobileMe and I trust myself to secure my data more than DropBox at this point. And I don't like places using my account to sell me advertising, but that's a different debate entirely and I can't necessarily argue the point well since I do use gmail, the king of selling your information.
 
1BadMac said:
I don't want to pay additional for MobileMe and I trust myself to secure my data more than DropBox at this point. And I don't like places using my account to sell me advertising, but that's a different debate entirely and I can't necessarily argue the point well since I do use gmail, the king of selling your information.
Click to expand...
I'm with you all the way on that one. I hear people talk about using the cloud for backup -- especially for SmartPhones. And what happens if you accidentally delete something very important and then sync with the "the cloud?" A day later your data is gone. Although I hear that MobileMe is pretty good with recovery.
 
miata said:
Although I hear that MobileMe is pretty good with recovery.
Click to expand...

I have heard this as well, plus the mobile device tracking services would be a plus. And Apple has some more skin in the game to keep your data protected VS some random Silicon Valley startup. :)
 
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