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Just snagged an SSD.

S

Sixtyin3

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 16, 2008
30
0
Well I have an early 2008 MBP and I just grabbed a 120gig Intel 320 SSD for $160 shipped. My 200gig HD is original and on its last leg.

I plan to install it with a fresh copy of Snow Leopard (I have the CDs) and then installing Lion again via the App Store.

Any issues going this way? Anyone got experience working on this particular MBP? Issues I may run into?
 
Sixtyin3 said:
Well I have an early 2008 MBP and I just grabbed a 120gig Intel 320 SSD for $160 shipped. My 200gig HD is original and on its last leg.

I plan to install it with a fresh copy of Snow Leopard (I have the CDs) and then installing Lion again via the App Store.

Any issues going this way? Anyone got experience working on this particular MBP? Issues I may run into?
Click to expand...

Make sure you update the firmware on that to the latest one from Intel. Some of them can mess up and show only 8mb left. That, you don't want.

I have the 320 in my 2011 MBP, and its absolutely great.
 
Sixtyin3 said:
How do you update the firmware inside OS X?
Click to expand...

You don't, but its really easy.

You download an ISO image from intels website and burn it to a CD or DVD. Keep the disc inside the macbook and boot the laptop holding option and select the disc to boot from.

Then just follow the instructions (theyre really easy).

Just backup all your data before you do any kind of update. I'm not sure if data gets deleted (you'll wanna look into that more), I updated the drive before I installed OS X Snow Leopard.
 
hi

it may only have an issure installing lion... every model year of macs have limit of the os updates installation. my 6 year old power mac g5 could only install leopard at the latest. i found this out when i called apple customer service.


Sixtyin3 said:
Well I have an early 2008 MBP and I just grabbed a 120gig Intel 320 SSD for $160 shipped. My 200gig HD is original and on its last leg.

I plan to install it with a fresh copy of Snow Leopard (I have the CDs) and then installing Lion again via the App Store.

Any issues going this way? Anyone got experience working on this particular MBP? Issues I may run into?
Click to expand...
 
md301 said:
it may only have an issure installing lion... every model year of macs have limit of the os updates installation. my 6 year old power mac g5 could only install leopard at the latest. i found this out when i called apple customer service.
Click to expand...

His MBP is intel so there's no issues
 
Good

You should have no issues at all,

Don't worry about firmware updates or anything.

If there was an important update , it'll be on the software update from apple them selves.


This procedure should go flawlessly
 
Sixtyin3 said:
Yeah I have Lion on it now. I only have physical disks for Snow Leopard so I'll start with that and then re-download Lion.
Click to expand...

May want to make yourself an Lion install disk / thumb drive too while you are at it. Good to have handy incase you need to put in a different drive for whatever reason.
 
abdu2s said:
Don't worry about firmware updates or anything.

If there was an important update , it'll be on the software update from apple them selves.
Click to expand...

False.

The Intel 320 series SSDs are prone to basically crash the drive and show a capacity of 8mb during power failure or other instances where lack of power is evident, ie; sleep mode on MacBook Pros.

The firmware update on the 320 for that is CRUCIAL. Its the main reason why I didnt install and use the 320 until the update was made available by Intel.
 
Titanium81 said:
How is it running? Dramatic speed increase?
Click to expand...

Some eye candy. I don't like the new finder set up, there is no longer a Mac HD icon on the desktop and its removed from finder on the left bar. It's just more of a hassle to navigate, it's like they felt the need to dumb down Finder.

It takes longer to boot as well I think, but I haven't timed it. Hopefully the SSD will fix this.
 
Sixtyin3 said:
Some eye candy. I don't like the new finder set up, there is no longer a Mac HD icon on the desktop and its removed from finder on the left bar. It's just more of a hassle to navigate, it's like they felt the need to dumb down Finder.

It takes longer to boot as well I think, but I haven't timed it. Hopefully the SSD will fix this.
Click to expand...

Oh, I thought you had Lion on an SSD in your 2008 MBP.

Was wondering what the speed increase was since the SSD swap.
 
For a second I thought you meant in the title "Just snapped an SSD", I was like shhiiiiii :eek: !!
 
Sixtyin3 said:
Some eye candy. I don't like the new finder set up, there is no longer a Mac HD icon on the desktop and its removed from finder on the left bar. It's just more of a hassle to navigate, it's like they felt the need to dumb down Finder.

It takes longer to boot as well I think, but I haven't timed it. Hopefully the SSD will fix this.
Click to expand...

You can change all that mate by clicking the finder button top left finder>preferences> then tick all the items you want to change/show.
 
Titanium81 said:
Oh, I thought you had Lion on an SSD in your 2008 MBP.

Was wondering what the speed increase was since the SSD swap.
Click to expand...

Sixtyin3 said:
I will this week hopefully when the SSD shows
Click to expand...

I'm interested to hear the result.

I'm thinking the HDD is probably the bottleneck not the processor. So with the SSD it should be blazing fast.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?
 
Last edited:
Well this hard drive is failing, but what kind of benchmarks can I run in OS X to do a before and after?
 
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