SSD Swap For Macbook

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

SSD Swap For Macbook

Looking to do the CD drive/SSD swapout if you havent seen the video here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMHnAxvMCNQ&feature=player_embedded#!

anyone have any suggestions on a good SSD I’m looking for most memory for a good price…

They recommended the

OCZ Vertex 2 SSD (240GB) for $305

I came across the

Crucial M4 (512GB ) for $735

has anyone done this swapout and could give some feedback?
and do you know of any better drives or deals?
how would i use the SSD just for traktor and my music?

2

The Mercury Extreme Pro 3G is $359 and a generation newer than the Vertex, but I think doing it that way is extremely wasteful.

I use a 120GB Pro 6G as my boot drive and love it. If I were going to replace the optical drive (which is dead…apparently SuperDrives like to fail on me…fortunately I don’t care) I’d probably get a 1TB hard drive instead of an SSD. Using it on the slower SATA bus loses some of the benefits of having an SSD, especially one that can saturate the higher-spec SATA channels that the MBP’s hard drive bay offers.

Also…Traktor isn’t very resource intensive at all. Upgrading your data drive to an SSD will see almost no noticeable improvement unless you’re constantly transferring files b/t your computer and somewhere else. And if you’re using USB drives like the vast majority of the world, you’ll see literally no improvement because USB sucks.

For similar money, you could get a DataDoubler/OptiBay and a 120GB Extreme Pro 6G…put the SSD in the hard drive bay as your boot drive and put the HDD in the DataDoubler in the optical drive bay. Clone your system (or reinstall) on the SSD (including applications) and keep your media on the hard drive.

That’s what I’d do.

3

so best route would be order the MBP with a 750 HD already and then order a SSD and move the HD to where the cd drive is then SSD as the main?

4

ive just put an ssd as my boot drive in my win 7 machine, with the 500gb hdd in the drive bay. the boot up times and general running of the computer are absolutely amazing! i wish i’d done this a long time ago!

5

I have a Vertex 2 120GB SSD and a 250GB HDD on my current 2010 MBP… Must say… I LOVE the SSD! ALthough I haven’t seen much of a difference when using traktor (performancewise) the START UP time for the laptop simply makes it worth every penny!!!

Plus programs like skype (which usually take a while to load on regular HDD’s) Start up sooo fast!

Do it man, you won’t regret it!

6

once you go SSD, you’ll get used to the speed difference very quickly. Then you’ll wonder what all the fuss is about… until you go back to using a system with a normal hard disk… then you’ll feel like you’re using a 486 DX2-66mhz from 1994 :smiley:

7

Having had a few disk read “stutters” in Ableton i think I’ll be going down the SSD route soon enough. Just seeing how fast stuff launches on a base model Macbook Air in the shop had me convinced - freaking instant everything.

8

so to everyone who has a SSD your SSD is your main drive that your OS boots off of and then the other drive is just for extra memory?

9

No.

The best route would be to not upgrade the drive from apple and either sell the OEM drive or put it in an external firewire chassis.

Apple’s hard drive, ram, and SSD upgrades cost a shit ton for what you get.

And don’t buy an SSD from Apple independent of price. Unless they’ve changed from the last time I looked, they sell really shitty SSDs for a lot more money than a good one costs from OWC. They’re using old controller chips that require the OS to suport TRIM, which OS X doesn’t.

I only have a 120GB SSD. I keep it clean, and as long as I don’t have a bunch of movies on it, I hover at about 22GB free with my DJ music and /Applications/Native Instruments/, /Applications/Avid/, and /Library/Audio/Plug-ins/ taking up the bulk of the space.

Some examples of the speed boost the SSD boot drive gives…

If my computer ever took more than 20 seconds to restart, I’d honestly think something was broken. Fortunately, it hasn’t happened.

Pro Tools 10 takes < 12 seconds to start (if I remember to have my iLok plugged in) and load its quick-start menu. And it feels slow compared to everything else.

Logic takes < 10 seconds to start and load it’s quick-start menu.

Maschine takes 8 seconds to start and re-load the last-edited project, and I’ve never had one of Maschine’s big multi-sampled Sounds take more than about 5 seconds to load. After 3 seconds, I start wondering if it’s crashed…which it almost never has.

And because the Mercury drives use good controllers, I don’t have to refresh it every few months like I did with my last drive…which is sitting in an external FW chassis.

Considering that 64-bit versions of a lot of audio software don’t run that stable yet (compared to 32-bit versions) and some of them bork out without disabling multi-core support…the SSD became the biggest upgrade you can make…since a lot of the time, you’ll only be using one processor core and 4GB of ram anyway.