State of the SSD

[CrackedButter]

I'm thinking of getting an extremely cheap SSD for my MacBook, I know the Intel versions are amazing but for SATA-150 it isn't going to matter, how good are the alternatives. I've seen a few Kingston drives that are 64GB @ £92 & 128GB @ £166.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-005-KS&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910

My main use for a large hard drive is to just hold onto my aperture library which I can offload onto an external drive or if there is a solution to remove the optical drive I'm all ears.

 

[A Macbook Pro]

I want a cheap SSD aswell. Something around the 64GB range. I'll have all my important files on the SSD and I'll have everything else on my portable backup HDD (500GB). So I get the awesome speed of the SSD and the firewire backup drive for all my movies and stuff.

 

[rgarjr]

I dont know which MB you have but there's caddys like Optibay as well as some other manufactures that sell them, you can swap your DVD drive and put one of these in there.

 

[CrackedButter]

I just have a 13" MacBook. Non Unibody, I found the website for the Optibay and already ordered, thanks.

Reading this article, it appears that the Front Row App and DVD player don't install if there is no internal optical drive. The solution is to use a hex editor and make some tweaks, anybody recommend one?

 

[andrewg77]

SSD upgrade and VOID Warranty

hey guys,

I just walked into a store in Sydney and asked about the new Macbook and third party SSD upgrades.

They said that by doing an upgrade of the Macbook to SSD you void the warranty..

The also said that if you buy a macbook pro without an SSD, and then upgrade it yourself, you will then void the warranty as well.

I thought that was misleading because i heard that hard disk upgrades are "user serviceable" like RAM in the Macbook pro.

Can anybody comment ?

Can I physically (with some hardware knowledge) be able to replace the std 250GB with an SSD in the new Macbook (ie is the work involved similar to that of a RAM upgrade).

Thoughts appreciated.

Andy.

 

[CrackedButter]

If you have a problem with your laptop and put the original drive back into the machine how will they know?

On second count, I had to send my MacBook in for repair and I didn't even give them the hard drive, they repaired it no question. Its standard practice to keep the hard drive in case they lose your data.

 

[Niiro13]

In my opinion, it's fully user serviceable as they make no mention of it voiding your warranty when they show you how to replace it:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/MacBook_13inch_Late2009_UG.pdf

That's the manual and even replacing RAM is in there. Because it doesn't say it voids your warranty, it shouldn't.

Note that the people at the Apple store sometimes may not know some of these little things. Actually, even when I called Apple Care they didn't know about it until I asked them about it being in the manual then they were like "oh".

 

[MythicFrost]

I have a 160GB Intel X25-M G2 and it's great, their is a 80GB model, how does that suit price wise?
I'm not sure what sata 150 is, are you sure it effects the SSD?

Kind Regards

 

[andrewg77]

re: SSD upgrade and VOID Warranty

thats great.. thanks for your help Niro / CrackedButter..

 

[CrackedButter]

I have a 160GB Intel X25-M G2 and it's great, their is a 80GB model, how does that suit price wise?
I'm not sure what sata 150 is, are you sure it effects the SSD?

Kind Regards

SATA-150 relates to the controllers ability to push data in Megabytes I think per second. SATA-300 is going to push the data twice as much.

Most 7200rpm drives top out at 70MB/per second. The drive I am interested in is 100MB/per second.

So an SSD which can do 220MB/per second will saturate a SATA-150 controller, but not a SATA-300.

 

[MythicFrost]

I see, the X25M iirc reads @ 250MB/s and writes @ 70MB/s, but it's not the sequential read and writes that matter so much with a SSD,
it's the random read & writes and other lightning fast calculations they make which is what makes the Intel so good compared to other SSDs.

I think I read in the second link that some SSDs can stutter (I think the JMicron Controller was one, not sure if there are anymore that do it) so maybe do some research on the one you choose to make sure it doesn't.

Here are two articles I read about SSDs they was very interesting, the second helped me to decide to get the X25 (I read the first link after I bought it iirc).
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3607&p=4
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1

 

[7031]

Probably quite off topic, but when it comes to SSDs my only real opinion is, I'll get one once they are cheaper and have more storage etc. Saying that, I feel that there may never be a point when they beat harddrives in that respect, but I suppose it is realistic to hope that such a time will come.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

 

[deathspared]

I'm very happy with my Kingston SSDNOW V Series drives. I have one in my macbook pro (128gb) and one in my Windows 7 HTPC (64gb). Fry's has some good prices right now in store.