penkapp.com

It’s Mac-hack week here at penkapp.com! I recently slapped up a post on how to upgrade your old Mac mini’s WiFi card. Well, I felt it was time to enter into the wonderful world of SSDs. I bought the “low-end” 13″ MacBook Pro with 2 Gb RAM and a 5400 RPM, 160 Gb hard drive knowing that I could save quite a bit of money by not choosing the 4-Gb memory upgrade offered by Apple, buy third-party RAM and install it myself. Since I had to open the mofo up, why not slap in an SSD, right?

The Hardware

1. 1 Corsair P128 2.5″ 128GB SATA II MLC Internal SSD ($339)
2. 1 OWC 4GB PC3-8500 DDR3 1066MHz SO-DIMM Upgrade Kit ($87.99)

The Tools

1. #0 Phillips screwdriver
2. Torx T6 screwdriver
3. adult beverage of choice

Cracking it Open

Before you start open-heart surgery on your MacBook, for the love of all things holy, page through the most-excellent 13″ MacBook Pro tear-down tutorial from ifixit.com and back up everything on your current hard drive to an external drive with SuperDuper! or Time Machine. Then, take a big swig from your adult beverage and dive in.

Click on the thumbnail image (right) to view my photo-set of the tear-down. Be very, very careful about keeping track of the 10 Phillips screws; some screws are different lengths. You do not need to remove the battery to replace the RAM or factory hard drive.

The RAM

Gently, pull apart the two side-clips to release the RAM modules and remove them at an angle. The RAM can only go in one way because of the notch along the bottom of the module. Gently push the new modules into the bottom and top slots, respectively. Push the top module down into the laptop and snap the modules into place with the two side-clips. Done.

The Hard Drive

The hard drive is nestled into the laptop via 4 Phillips screws and two side brackets or cage. The top-most, black bracket should be removed to get the hard drive out. Gently detach the hard drive ribbon cable (left side) and pull up on the plastic, pull-flap to lift the drive out of the laptop. Remove the 4 screws along the sides of the old drive with a Torx T6 screwdriver and screw these into the holes along the sides of the new drive.

Reapply the plastic, pull-flap that was on the side of the old drive. Then, reattach the hard drive ribbon cable, set the new drive into the two, black side-brackets and secure the drive with the 4 Phillips screws. Place the back cover on the laptop and close it up with the 10 Phillips screws. Done.

Data Transfer

The previous work took me about 40 minutes and it was time to get my old Snow Leopard install and personal data back onto the new drive. Connect the external drive you use for your SuperDuper! or Time Machine backups and start up the laptop. Stick your Mac OS X installation DVD into the superdrive slot and hold down the Option key. Wait while the computer recognizes the DVD as a boot option, select the DVD and press return.

After waiting what seems like an eternity, the DVD boots into install mode. Select Utilities from the menu bar and choose “Disk Utility.” I formatted the new drive as a single partition, Mac OS X journaled ensuring the GUID partition table option was selected under “Options.”

Next, select “Utilities > Restore System from Backup” from the menu bar. Follow the instructions and let it do its thang. My recovery process took about an hour, but it will vary depending on how much crap you have on your drive.

The Results

I poked around for a free hard drive benchmarking app, but found a few lines of code that would provide decent stats:

Write speed test

Read speed test

Make sure the count= value is greater than your total RAM. The numbers? Wow. Write speed: 23 MB/s (182 Mbit/s) and read speed: 37 MB/s (298 Mbit/s). Compare this to a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500-Gb hard drive at 107Mbit/s read and 98Mbit/s write. My original drive was the 5400-RPM model, so the difference would be even more dramatic. Booting the machine and loading the desktop UI is wicked fast. Basically, the SSD is 3x faster read, 2x faster write. So I got that going for me, which is nice.