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Using a data doubler SSD on MBP 13"

1

196josue

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Jun 16, 2010
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I wanted to kno if using a data doubler with a 256gb SSD and already having a 320gb HDD would speed up my MBP? I wanted to format the drives to use SPAN or basically combining space for one big drive. I didn't know if the HDD would slow down the SSD if I did that. Thanks for y'alls help!
 
alust2013

alust2013

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Feb 6, 2010
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I would just use it as two separate drives. Using it as one would probably slow down your speed from the SSD if you did that. It also wouldn't really provide you with much benefit either
 
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196josue

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That's what I thought. Which items should be on my SSD vs my HDD
 
M

miata

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Oct 22, 2010
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I'm also considering this kind of hybrid solution. I would make the SSD the boot disk with all your applications, email and frequently accessed files. I would keep less frequently accessed files on the HDD -- these might include larger media files. The other option is to use the 320 HDD as a Time Machine disk.
 
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196josue

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Jun 16, 2010
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miata said:
I'm also considering this kind of hybrid solution. I would make the SSD the boot disk with all your applications, email and frequently accessed files. I would keep less frequently accessed files on the HDD -- these might include larger media files. The other option is to use the 320 HDD as a Time Machine disk.
Click to expand...


How would I make the SSD the boot disk? Steps? And I would like to put Itunes on the SSD because I have about 110GB on itunes in music and at times its slow in accessing my music because there is so much. Is putting the Itunes file on the SSD a solution to that?
 
Muscle Master

Muscle Master

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Oct 15, 2010
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196josue said:
How would I make the SSD the boot disk? Steps? And I would like to put Itunes on the SSD because I have about 110GB on itunes in music and at times its slow in accessing my music because there is so much. Is putting the Itunes file on the SSD a solution to that?
Click to expand...

hmm.. depends. Are you using your SSD as a boot drive or just for storing data

If it's your boot drive than yes... but more than likely you will use most of your Precious SSD space

but define slow.. on my dell I had 12 GB of music and everything played under 2 secs
 
M

miata

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Oct 22, 2010
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196josue said:
How would I make the SSD the boot disk? Steps? And I would like to put Itunes on the SSD because I have about 110GB on itunes in music and at times its slow in accessing my music because there is so much. Is putting the Itunes file on the SSD a solution to that?
Click to expand...
Weird about iTunes. You are saying that navigating in iTunes is slow. Is that the problem?

Well anyway, here are the steps to make your SSD boot disk.

1) Get your current disk down to about 200 GB by deleting or temporarily moving files to something else. If you are really concerned about iTunes and have the space then do not move your music from the disk.

2) Use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the data from the HDD to the SSD

3) Go to Preferences/Startup Disk and select the SSD

4) Reboot system and make sure everything is working well. I would check things out for a few days -- before going to the next step.

5) If you are sure the the new disk is working fine you can delete data from the HDD -- you can even do a full erase if you like

6) Copy data that you previously moved back onto the HDD
 
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196josue

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Jun 16, 2010
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Well like 30 seconds slow. I have a lot more than 12 gb. I have 110 gb
 
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196josue

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Jun 16, 2010
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miata said:
196josue said:
How would I make the SSD the boot disk? Steps? And I would like to put Itunes on the SSD because I have about 110GB on itunes in music and at times its slow in accessing my music because there is so much. Is putting the Itunes file on the SSD a solution to that?
Click to expand...
Weird about iTunes. You are saying that navigating in iTunes is slow. Is that the problem?

Well anyway, here are the steps to make your SSD boot disk.

1) Get your current disk down to about 200 GB by deleting or temporarily moving files to something else. If you are really concerned about iTunes and have the space then do not move your music from the disk.

2) Use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the data from the HDD to the SSD

3) Go to Preferences/Startup Disk and select the SSD

4) Reboot system and make sure everything is working well. I would check things out for a few days -- before going to the next step.

5) If you are sure the the new disk is working fine you can delete data from the HDD -- you can even do a full erase if you like

6) Copy data that you previously moved back onto the HDD
Click to expand...

Thanks miata
 
1

196josue

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Original poster
Jun 16, 2010
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miata said:
196josue said:
How would I make the SSD the boot disk? Steps? And I would like to put Itunes on the SSD because I have about 110GB on itunes in music and at times its slow in accessing my music because there is so much. Is putting the Itunes file on the SSD a solution to that?
Click to expand...
Weird about iTunes. You are saying that navigating in iTunes is slow. Is that the problem?

Well anyway, here are the steps to make your SSD boot disk.

1) Get your current disk down to about 200 GB by deleting or temporarily moving files to something else. If you are really concerned about iTunes and have the space then do not move your music from the disk.

2) Use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the data from the HDD to the SSD

3) Go to Preferences/Startup Disk and select the SSD

4) Reboot system and make sure everything is working well. I would check things out for a few days -- before going to the next step.

5) If you are sure the the new disk is working fine you can delete data from the HDD -- you can even do a full erase if you like

6) Copy data that you previously moved back onto the HDD
Click to expand...

Or say I want to use 2 SSD for a big span drive. How would I create one big span drive?
 
M

miata

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Oct 22, 2010
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196josue said:
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Or say I want to use 2 SSD for a big span drive. How would I create one big span drive?
Click to expand...
You will need to get your data off the system. The easiest thing to do is to pull out the current drive and put it in an external USB2 or Firewire case. The install both drives and use the concatenated option in Disk Utilities. I'm not sure why you would use concatenate rather create a striped RAID set. A striped RAID would be quite a bit faster.
 
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196josue

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Jun 16, 2010
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What is the difference between the two?
 
M

miata

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Oct 22, 2010
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196josue said:
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What is the difference between the two?
Click to expand...
Concatenated disks are good if you want to continually adding different sized disks to your system. Striping requires that you erase everything and you need to use two disks of the same size and speed. Striping (RAID 0) will give you much better performance, since your data can be read and written simultaneously to both disks.
 
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196josue

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Jun 16, 2010
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Ok. Thats in the disk utility? So then would it be a good idea to do a clean install and only transferring files like iTunes and reinstalling your apps?
 
M

miata

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Oct 22, 2010
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196josue said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Ok. Thats in the disk utility? So then would it be a good idea to do a clean install and only transferring files like iTunes and reinstalling your apps?
Click to expand...
You'l find Disk Utility in the Applications/Utilities folder on the Mac.

The best thing to do would be to put your current drive in an external firewire or USB2 enclosure and use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything back to the new , fast SSD RAID.

Do a google searc hto find where to download Carbon Copy Cloner.
 
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196josue

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Jun 16, 2010
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miata said:
196josue said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Ok. Thats in the disk utility? So then would it be a good idea to do a clean install and only transferring files like iTunes and reinstalling your apps?
Click to expand...
You'l find Disk Utility in the Applications/Utilities folder on the Mac.

The best thing to do would be to put your current drive in an external firewire or USB2 enclosure and use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything back to the new , fast SSD RAID.

Do a google searc hto find where to download Carbon Copy Cloner.
Click to expand...

I have an external 500gb drive that I'm using for time machine. Could I just use the info on that to clone over to the SSD Raid?
 
M

miata

macrumors 6502
Oct 22, 2010
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Silicon Valley, Earth
196josue said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)



I have an external 500gb drive that I'm using for time machine. Could I just use the info on that to clone over to the SSD Raid?
Click to expand...

Unless you are having stability problems and want to do a clean install you can save a lot of time by copying your current system disk. Restoring from Time Machine require you do a clean install of the OS, then you restore the data using the migration assistant, then you have to update all the patches. The migration assistant is pretty good, but you usually have to fix up little things like missing activation serial numbers, etc.
 
1

196josue

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Original poster
Jun 16, 2010
115
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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

miata said:
196josue said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)



I have an external 500gb drive that I'm using for time machine. Could I just use the info on that to clone over to the SSD Raid?
Click to expand...

Unless you are having stability problems and want to do a clean install you can save a lot of time by copying your current system disk. Restoring from Time Machine require you do a clean install of the OS, then you restore the data using the migration assistant, then you have to update all the patches. The migration assistant is pretty good, but you usually have to fix up little things like missing activation serial numbers, etc.
Click to expand...

So then what would be my best option in your opinion. From old HHD or time machine?
 
K

Kyffin

macrumors 6502
Sep 5, 2010
419
0
miata said:
Well anyway, here are the steps to make your SSD boot disk.

1) Get your current disk down to about 200 GB by deleting or temporarily moving files to something else. If you are really concerned about iTunes and have the space then do not move your music from the disk.

2) Use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the data from the HDD to the SSD

3) Go to Preferences/Startup Disk and select the SSD

4) Reboot system and make sure everything is working well. I would check things out for a few days -- before going to the next step.

5) If you are sure the the new disk is working fine you can delete data from the HDD -- you can even do a full erase if you like

6) Copy data that you previously moved back onto the HDD
Click to expand...

Hi, thanks for the useful information. I've just cloned my disk (straight swap for hybrid HD- waiting on what Intel brings come February) yet omitted step 3.

I was hoping for a noticeable difference in boot time (result: none/possibly longer) and think that when booting the computer may still be looking for the absent drive first- just wondering if there is a way to do this now with the disk in situ or has the ship sailed on this one?

Many thanks!
 
M

miata

macrumors 6502
Oct 22, 2010
499
0
Silicon Valley, Earth
Kyffin said:
Hi, thanks for the useful information. I've just cloned my disk (straight swap for hybrid HD- waiting on what Intel brings come February) yet omitted step 3.

I was hoping for a noticeable difference in boot time (result: none/possibly longer) and think that when booting the computer may still be looking for the absent drive first- just wondering if there is a way to do this now with the disk in situ or has the ship sailed on this one?

Many thanks!
Click to expand...
YOu can change your startup disk any time by going to the System Preferences. You can also select at boot time by pushing and holding the option key when you start up.
 
K

Kyffin

macrumors 6502
Sep 5, 2010
419
0
miata said:
YOu can change your startup disk any time by going to the System Preferences. You can also select at boot time by pushing and holding the option key when you start up.
Click to expand...

Thanks miata for getting back so soon (I'd just re-read your post and was restarting before edit.)

Your instructions are very clear. Should have read more carefully,:eek:

Thank you!
 
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