Thinking of upgrading my Macbook (Late 2007) with a SSD in the optical bay

[thoang77]

So my late 2007 Macbook feels like it needs an upgrade, and I think a SSD for Lion and the apps would be a good solid upgrade. However I have a couple of questions.

1) I know Lion only natively supports TRIM with apple SSDs, however I have read that you can use TRIMenabler to enable TRIM to 3rd party SSDs. Is there a specific brand/model of SSD that works best for TRIMenabler in Lion?

2) I know macbooks have the shock sensors for the HDD, so would it be best to keep the standard HDD in the SATA spot and use the new SSD in the optical bay since it doesnt need the shock sensor?

3) Would I see any performance decrease from having the SSD in the optical bay since its PATA?

4) Is a generic caddy from ebay just as good as a MCE Optibay (which is just ridiculous to charge $100 for that piece of sheet metal and a tiny logic board)?

Also, I wasnt sure if this belonged in the OSX forum or the Macbook forum. Hopefully I didnt put it in the wrong place!
Thanks for the help!

 

[r0k]

So my late 2007 Macbook feels like it needs an upgrade, and I think a SSD for Lion and the apps would be a good solid upgrade. However I have a couple of questions.

1) I know Lion only natively supports TRIM with apple SSDs, however I have read that you can use TRIMenabler to enable TRIM to 3rd party SSDs. Is there a specific brand/model of SSD that works best for TRIMenabler in Lion?

2) I know macbooks have the shock sensors for the HDD, so would it be best to keep the standard HDD in the SATA spot and use the new SSD in the optical bay since it doesnt need the shock sensor?

3) Would I see any performance decrease from having the SSD in the optical bay since its PATA?

4) Is a generic caddy from ebay just as good as a MCE Optibay (which is just ridiculous to charge $100 for that piece of sheet metal and a tiny logic board)?

Also, I wasnt sure if this belonged in the OSX forum or the Macbook forum. Hopefully I didnt put it in the wrong place!
Thanks for the help!

This almost seems more suited to buying tips and advice. Anyway, I have a Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB 7200 RPM / 4GB SSD and I'm quite happy with it in my 4 year old Macbook. I also upgraded my RAM to 4 GB. I rip a lot of movies so I'd rather hold onto my optical drive (for now) so as long as yours is working perhaps you too might be happier with the hybrid drive.

I get 20-30 second boot times. I get 0.5 to 20 second app launch times depending on how frequently I use the app. I get a lot of beachballs but closing and reopening Chrome and its 70 to 90 tabs chases them away every time.

I wouldn't worry about the caddy. A SSD is just some memory chips in an SATA HDD enclosure. You could duct tape the thing in place if you wanted to.