Comment by matthew-wegner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthew-wegner | Hacker News Reader

Not MBA-related, but for MBP machines you can use an OptiBay bracket to pull out the optical drive and replace it with an SSD or HD. Couple notes on that:

- The OptiBay is $80, but includes a USB enclosure for your SuperDrive to turn it into an external drive: http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

- Cheap clone brackets are ~$20 on eBay, work just as well.

- The original HD bay includes a sudden motion sensor to park the heads on a drop. Ideal setup is to put an SSD in the optical bay and a HD in the internal.

- Battery life doesn't seem affected by two drives. I suspect cpu/video/display power significantly outweighs power from an SSD.

- The optical bay is 3 Gbps, the HD bay is 6 Gbps. Don't bother with the extra cost of new 6 Gbps SSDs if you put it in the optical position.

- If you do this on a new machine, do your boot camp install before you remove the drive. MacBook Pros have some kind of hard-wired device order that makes it impossible to install Windows from an external USB/FireWire optical drive.

I run a 250 GB SandForce SSD + 500 GB 7200rpm drive. SandForce does on-device garbage collection, which helps since OS X has no general-use TRIM support, and I do photo editing on the road so the faster HD is great.

I have almost the exact same setup, save for a 120 GB SSD. But everything you've said is correct. I would add that the setup is surprisingly straightforward and that the OptiBay product comes with great installation docs. Unlike 2007 and earlier Apple portables, this generation is pretty easy to crack open.

I love my 15" MBP configured as described. No, it's not especially light or sleek compared to a MacBook Air. But it's the fastest, most responsive machine I've ever used in my life. And the processor is a smidge fresher, so I feel better about obsolescence.

One tip if you're going to go the two drive route:

You can symlink heavy files that apps expect to be on your startup disk to your HDD. So in my case, I've symlinked my iTunes movies, iTunes U, iPhoto library, and a couple of other things and store them on the HDD. I don't touch these often and when I do, time isn't of the essence, so there's no point consuming my precious SSD capacity.

New MacBook Pro models are shipping with TRIM support for bundled Apple SSDs.

When did this change happen, and how can you tell by the model #?

Source please?

According to Anandtech, at least the new 13",15",17" when ordered with an SSD builtin have TRIM support. 3rd party drives are not supported. I don't know about the Airs though -- He alludes to it in another article, but I can't find definitive proof. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4205/the-macbook-pro-review-13...

It's also possible to change the plist files to get TRIM support on third party SSD's. I am currently running a Intel 320 SSD with TRIM enabled on my Macbook (according to System Profiler). The utility can be found here http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322

I did the same SSD and HDD to OptiBay replacement, but I have different results. The battery life dropped about 30%-40% and that wasn't the issue. The real problem is the heat, as usual on Mac, Flash is CPU raper, but with HDD in place of DVD drive its 6200/RPMS in any flash video > 360P.

I recently bought a 2011 MBP 13" and did this. SSD with Win7 in the cd bay, 7200rpm drive with OSX in main bay.

Boy is the 'no boot from USB' thing on the new Macbooks a giant pain in the ass! Installing it is one thing, but last night for some reason Windows wouldn't boot so I needed to to startup repair, had to unscrew the whole thing and put the superdrive back in to do it. Should have been a 5 min operation, wasted a days work (superdrive was at home).

I wonder if I can make a 5gb partition on my main drive to be a windows install disk in case it happens again?

Awesome info, thanks! I'm looking at doing exactly this soon. A few questions:

How do you have your OSX directories partitioned across the drives? Can you move, say /, to the SSD while keeping /home/media on the larger platter drive? I only know how to do this with Linux, not very familiar with OSX despite it being BSD-based.

I have this setup, and what I did was symlink various things on the SSD to the HDD. /Users/me/{Downloads,Movies,Music}, /usr/local/var for frequently deleted development databases, and VirtualMachine images. Some of these are large directories, but I also try to keep files that are frequently deleted on the HDD, too.

If you go into System Preferences > Accounts, you can right-click on your user and choose Advanced Options. I copied my home dir to the HDD, then linked it here.

You get more nuance from symlinks, etc, but this was a simple method which worked for me. Other people mentioned symlinking some dirs, but no one had mentioned that you could move your entire user directory this way.

I just go the symlink route, and move Photos/Movies/Music to the HD with symlinks left behind. I guess it isn't as robust for Time Machine backups, although I haven' tested this!

I have a very similar setup. I highly recommend this article, which elaborates on what you discuss:

http://remiel.info/post/1601242301/making-the-leap-to-ssd-on...

I've got a similar setup and it got me thinking about buying a used mac pro tower to max out the 4 HD slots with SSDs and RAID them across. Anyone try that or know if the speed boost would be noticeable?

I have a 250GB SSD + 1TB HDD thanks to the optibay. I couldn't be happier.

Oh, and it's worth mentioning--I fully expect Apple to remove the optical bay entirely in their 2012 design refresh. Mayyyybe they'll keep a second bay as a stock option, but I doubt it!

I expect they will make the whole line thinner using the SSD form factor from the Macbook Airs, but perhaps offering up to 512GB since the MBP laptops are still going to be quite large compared to an Air.

It's also feasible that they could fit a normal SATA form factor drive and the new slot-style SSDs in a thinner form factor.

They'll have to release some product that makes it easy for non-technical folks to offload low-performance files to the spinning disk versus the SSD, or they'll just market the spinning disk as a built-in Time Machine + Auto Save target.

Info on Auto Save: http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/

Very good to hear that SandForce does on-device garbage collection!

I'm seriously considering to swap the HDD in my MBP with a SSD and I was still a bit unsure about the TRIM support under OSX.

Anyone have experience with the knockoff optibay adapters on ebay? They're cheap (~$10 to $25) - [edit: never mind, that's what he means by $20 brackets.]

What about the warranty?

Hard drives are considered a user-serviceable component, so the aftermarket SSD is fine. It's the optibay drive which won't fly if he ever needs to receive service. The easy fix for that is to remove the optibay, and re-install the optical drive before service before bringing it anywhere for repair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com