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Comment by danilocampos | Hacker News Reader

I killed my MacBook Air envy by buying a Core i5 MBP, replacing the optical drive with a 128 GB SSD, installing the system and applications to the SSD and symlinking everything big and rarely accessed (iPhoto library, movies, iTunes U, etc) to the HDD. I have AppleScripts that mount/unmount the rotational drive when needed, and my machine now screams. It's heavier, sure, but I don't travel much and I love having all the additional internal storage. I still get over 8 hours of battery and the machine is silent as long as I'm not accessing anything on the rotational drive.

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That's a much more expensive system. If we configure them as:

Macbook Pro 15: $1800 + $250 for 128GB SSD

Macbook Air 13: $1300 + $100 for 4GB RAM

Both machines will have the same size SSD, RAM, and same number of pixels, but the MBP will be $650 more.

(I know there are other ways of configuring the two, like adding a $100 hi-res option to the MBP, or adding the $100 MCE OptiBay like you did. I ignored them for simplicity and to create a more apples-to-apples comparison.)

Sigh, makes me regret my setup even more, price-wise. I have a big early adopter problem. First SSD was $680 for 80GB, it died, Intel sent me a second generation replacement. Then I purchased a second for $400, put them in my 17-inch MBP (older core 2 duo) in RAID 0 via an optibay. Then upgraded to 8GB of RAM when I started using redis locally. System screams but the SSDs are showing their age. I almost always run the drives close to maxed out storage. I used to have large volumes like iTunes on my Time Capsule but whenever I wanted to play a song it would take 10 seconds for the Time Capsule to spin up the drive.

http://paulstamatiou.com/ssd-raid-performance-9-months-later

I'm waiting until Lion comes out for any more hardware changes. Now that I'm using Jekyll locally (and will be just rsyncing the files) and it needs to regenerate 1000+ posts with layout etc changes, the core 2 duo is showing its age. And I have LSI disabled..

RAID-0 after having one die? RAID-1 would still get you double read speeds in the cases that tend to matter (small scattered reads), right? And is there a use-case for double write speeds on a non-server machine?

raid-1 may or may not get you double read speeds - it depends on how things are set up. ARe you sure the OSX implementation will take advantage of this?

Oh, it surely is, but I'm paying a premium for two things:

Additional internal storage – very important if you want one and only one Mac.

Double the RAM ceiling - 8 GB on the MBP versus 4 on the Air. And the MBP is user-upgradable, which feels better to me.

You also get longer battery life with the Pro, but since I'm not usually that far from an outlet, it's not a big deal. I'm also happier to have an incrementally faster and later-generation processor, since that'll hopefully grant a further 6 to 18 months usable lifespan for the machine.

+1. I put a 140GB Intel X-25 in my old non-unibody Mac. This thing boots so fast I can barely notice it. The only thing I really miss out on is the extended battery life of the newer macs.

Those AppleScripts sound interesting -- mind sharing a link to more info?

I, too, would like to see these AppleScripts!

They're nothing special, and I can quote them right here if you like:

To mount a partition:

  do shell script "diskutil mount PARTITION_UUID"

Where PARTITION_UDID is the partition's UUID as returned by diskutil's info command.

To unmount all partitions:

  try
  do shell script "diskutil unmount PARTITION_UUID"
  end try

  try
  do shell script "diskutil unmount NEXT_PARTITION_UUID"
  end try

The try is there in case one partition is mounted and another isn't – won't throw an error in those cases.

Just compile those as self-contained apps, drop them in your dock and you're good to go. It's pretty manual stuff, I have to remember to launch the appropriate script at the beginning and end of a task that involves the HDD, but it's not much of a problem, since I don't use it that often. Meanwhile, you get a silent MBP, with a smidge better battery life, since the HDD isn't spinning needlessly.

Looking into auto-mounting the partition when a symlink is accessed, got a SuperUser question going here:

http://superuser.com/questions/228028/mount-drive-when-symbo...

There's actually a dedicated Script menu available in the OS. Instead of deploying .apps and taking up space in the Dock, you can start up AppleScript Editor and check "Show Script menu in menu bar" in its Preferences. Then place your scripts in ~/Library/Scripts (or ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/<application name> to have them only appear while a certain application is active).

> Looking into auto-mounting the partition when a symlink is accessed

Ah, see now that's what I imagined would be going on here ;)

From your SuperUser question it looks like there's a service called, appropriately enough, automountd. Neat! Is there no end to Unix's little undiscovered gems?

Some docs: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin...

A decent tutorial-style blog article: http://rajeev.name/2007/11/22/autofs-goodness-in-apples-leop...

(My new SSD shows up on Wednesday!)

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