Anyone use SSD + HDD in the SuperDrive bay?

[lieb39]

Hello everyone,

I've got a 2.66 GHz Intel C2Duo 15" Macbook Pro - love it. I currently have a 1TB 5200rpm hard drive in it, which is by no means a quick hard drive but the storage capacity makes up for it.

Having a read around, removing the superdrive to slot my current HDD into that area, and putting a SSD in place sounds mighty tempting - has anyone done this? Reports?

I suppose the next question I should ask is which SSD should I be looking at? Any particular brands or models that work particularly well with Macs?

Thanks!
Daniel

 

[MathiasMM]

Hello everyone,

I've got a 2.66 GHz Intel C2Duo 15" Macbook Pro - love it. I currently have a 1TB 5200rpm hard drive in it, which is by no means a quick hard drive but the storage capacity makes up for it.

Having a read around, removing the superdrive to slot my current HDD into that area, and putting a SSD in place sounds mighty tempting - has anyone done this? Reports?

I suppose the next question I should ask is which SSD should I be looking at? Any particular brands or models that work particularly well with Macs?

Thanks!
Daniel

I just performed the operation.

I swapped in a 64 gb Crucial RealSSD C300 that i got on a crazy half price offer from an e-tailer.

Used a cheap knockoff adapter for the optical drive slot (Ebay "optibay" - they're REALLY cheap for the old non-unibody models, if that's what you have), and for now it's fine. Took about half an hour, cut that in half for the second time I'd have to do it.
I like the SSD a lot, everything is faster, there's no waiting. Best upgrade you can do, I'd say.

As for SSD's, I'd prefer something based on a SandForce controller. There's new ones just out, but they basically need SATA 6gbps to not be bottlenecked according to what i read. There may be some good deals coming up on the older ones.
Otherwise, Intel's are good, as are the Crucial ones, although there seems to have been some quality issues with those. Common for the last two are some problems that can arise once the drive has been close to full capacity. The Sandforce drives have this problem to a lesser degree, but basically the drives can become bogged down in data, and never fully recover until you wipe the partitions. TRIM in Lion should somewhat alleviate this.