Hey Roger,

Sorry for the delay - the holidays got in the way. I now have exactly 100 items in my Applications folder (just a coincidence). I’ve got 24.34 GB available on the SSD. From what I remember, there were approximately 10 GB used on the SSD when it was only Snow Leopard installed (i.e. before I migrated the applications).

See you - Happy New Year -

John

Hi John,

Thanks for the reply I’m really intrigued by this since I heard about it on the podcast but being new to the Mac platform I’m still not 100% sure exactly what goes on the SSD drive besides the OS files and applications.  Did you just do a fresh install of Snow Leopard and your applications and then move your home folder to the other drive?  I just need a little more step by step to get my head around this but I’m pretty sure that I have the basic premise of what is being done here.  If you have a step by step or can direct me to a site or link that would give me more info that would be great.

Thanks, Roger

Hi Roger

I’m about to create this set up on my MacBook Pro (unibody 2.8GhZ Core 2 Duo).

If you just clone your current System to the SSD it will be too large.

I’ll describe below how to install from scratch and keep your library to a manageable size.

I’ve been researching it for a while now and I’m quite experienced at HD swapouts and system installs, so I’m hoping I know the steps to take.

(HDD means the internal Hard Disk Drive, SSD refers to the ExpressCard slot Solid State Drive).

I’m replacing the internal HDD with a larger, faster drive and adding a 48GB FileMate SSD in the ExpressCard slot to be the Startup drive.

The OS, Apps and system and library (without themes or templates installed by specific apps) will live on the SSD.
My home folder, and all files and media, plus themes and template from apps, will be stored on the internal HDD.

Obviously this will be a more useful post if I wait until after I’ve done the install successfully, but I can distill some of the stuff I’ve learned so far here if that helps…: (I’m waiting for the hardware to arrive, so it will be a few days before I do it myself)...

BEFORE YOU START
Clone your internal drive to an external drive. Obviously.
The easiest way is to use CarbonCopyCloner.
If you want to make a nice new clean install of your apps etc (and you will) you should ideally install them all fresh, i.e. re-download them or go back to original discs.
To make this easier, make a list of all your registration codes and passwords now.
Otherwise you will have to reboot from your clone to find them all anyway, so you might as well do it now.

HARDWARE
Forums seem to agree that not all ExpressCardSSDs will be recognised as bootable drives.
The FileMate48GB SSD seems to be the one that works for everyone.
Not all MacBooks will boot from the ExpressCard slot. Those with Model Identifier (“About This Mac”, “More Info”) ending 4,1 or 5,1. definitely will boot from the ExpressCard SSD. Others *might* but not everyone agrees on this.

THE INSTALL - OPTION 1
Insert your SSD into the ExpressCard Slot.
Use Disk Utility to reformat the SSD as a HFS+ Mac drive.
Insert your SnowLeopard install disk.
Install OSX to the SSD.
Select Custom Install to remove unneeded printer drivers, languages etc. as you don’t want to fill up the SSD.
Use System Pref to select the SSD as the startup drive and restart.
Run software update several times to bring your new OS up to date.
Use Disk Utility to partition your internal HDD to two volumes. Make one volume around 50GB for the system. The rest is your file storage.
Use CCC to clone your startup SSD drive to the 50GB HDD volume and set CCC to make periodic back-ups.
This way, if your SSD ever fails, you can still startup from the internal drive.

THE INSTALL - OPTION 2
If the install disk doesn’t allow you to install OSX to the SSD then do it in the reverse order:
Restart from the OSX Install CD.
Partition the internal HDD as above using Disk Utility on the install CD.
Install OSX on the HDD 50GB partition. Use Custom Install to avoid installing unnecessary languages and drivers.
Run software update several times.
Now download Carbon Copy Cloner and use that to clone the new OSX partition to your SSD.
Now use Startup Disk in the System Preferences to make the SSD your boot drive.
Its the same as above, but in a different order and should avoid any problems of the mac recognising the SSD as a bootable drive.

MOVE YOUR HOME FOLDER
You want your content stored on your internal HDD or your SSD will fill up quickly.
To move your Home (User) folder from the startup disk:
System Preferences
Accounts
Click the lock and enter your password to make changes
“Ctrl” and click on your account and select “Advanced Options”
Here you can nominate a folder to be your home folder.
This should be on your HDD.
Now iTunes, iPhoto and other apps will store their content here rather than on your startup disk.

KEEPING THE LIBRARY SMALL
It is easy to end up with a large Library folder which will become larger than the SSD can manage.
This is caused by Applications which have added content which will fill up that library.

Notable culprits are Apple Studio (i.e. Final Cut, Motion, DVD Studio etc.) and iMovie and Garage Band.
These will store large audio and video files in the Library (audio loops, video templates, graphical content for Motion).

In Apple Studio, you can choose the location for these files during installation. Choose to put them on the internal HDD.

For GarageBand you can do the same, but you need to use Terminal. Simple instructions here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040117222032141

iDVD also uses up loads of space with its themes. Instructions for moving its theme library here:
http://www.macosxhints.com/comment.php?mode=view&cid=64489&query=folder

By careful installation of apps from new, you can keep the library way below the 48GB of your SSD. The theme libraries above can easily swallow 20GB so moving them will make the difference between a successful install and a full start up disk.

FWIW themes and templates that are not audio or video based (such as MS Office templates or iWeb themes) take up hardly any room so don’t worry about trying to move them.

Now you need to rebuild your iPhoto, iTunes, email, network settings etc. which is a long post in itself.

These are all quite easy to do but need to be done carefully to avoid annoying issues (like losing the tags from your iTunes music).

You can Google these topics, or just post any specific questions and I’ll answer them as best I can.

good luck

t.

Tim thanks for all the info I will let you know how I make out, now all I have to do is get the drive and get to work.

Thanks, Roger

I just setup my Wintel 48GB SSD on my early 2008 MB Pro, 2.5Ghz/core 2/4GB/250GB internal HDD.
The speed difference is astonishing.
I have had 2 odd occurrences though in the past 5 days since install:
1. After sleep I could do and use everything in the os except click on the Apple logo or app menu on the Menu Bar. I had to press power button, choose restart and after waiting all of 25 seconds for full reboot (sweet) things were fine.
2. Last night, again after sleep, Cmd+Space wouldn’t bring up Quicksilver or the default, Spotlight, for that matter. reboot fixed. One thing I forgot to do before reboot was to look at Activity Monitor to see what was loaded, responding or such.

If of interest to anyone, here’s the short version of my process:
1. Time Machine backup of internal HDD
2. formatted Wintel - GUID
3. Fresh install of 10.6 from DVD to Wintel 48GB SSD
    I Created username same as my internal HDD username
4. Ran Software Update 2x
5. Installed iLife (manual to skip Garage Band)
6. Ran Software Update
7. Preferences, Accounts, Ctrl+Click, Advanced Options; then navigated to my /Users/Username folder on internal HDD. This allowed me to point to all my existing data.
8. Used superDuper to make a disk image of the SSD to an external firewire HDD.

I’m still dealing with figuring out what apps, data, etc. to move to the SSD. I’m a little on edge about why the two glitches mentioned above happened. I’ve never had something like that happen to this point in the 2 years with this MBP.

Next year when internal SSDs are cheaper I can see replacing my internal HDD with SSD as well and see even a little more speed improvement. It is noticeable the difference in speed when you load something like iPhoto where there is a huge photo library on the HDD. The iPhoto app pops up immediately then you can sense the time needed to load the iPhoto Library.

I hope this may be useful to others considering SSD.

I’ve read (Amazon IIRC) of the expressCard SSDs overheating and failing.
Does anyone have any longer term observations about how running your OS on the SSD is working?

Here’s an update to my February 24 post. One month out I had no more glitches with the wintec SSD. That is until last night. The SSD at some point during sleep went completely down. When OS X desktop came back up I got a message the boot volume was not available. I rebooted and SSD was not recognized at all. I have been running a SuperDuper backup every 2 or 3 days or so therefore it only took ten minutes to recover from this. It’s a bit unnerving that this thing just quits. On the other hand the performance boost and speedy recovery time from good backup means I’m going to stick with it. Also I am maintaining OS X boot on my internal HDD also as additional backup.

All-

I just wanted to thank everyone for their posts! You inspired me to get the new 17in MBP w/the expresscard slot + a 48GB drive and I’m SOOOO happy I did   It runs SO flipping fast.

Only ran into one issue thus far, My machine started to semi-come out of standby then just sorta stopped, force shutdown + reboot and it was fine, haven’t tried to sleep again yet.  I did just change the hibernate mode to 5 (write to disk, don’t use ram, using secure virtual memory).  We’ll see how that goes - will let everyone know!

Josh

ootoaoo - 20 April 2010 09:47 AM

Only ran into one issue thus far, My machine started to semi-come out of standby then just sorta stopped, force shutdown + reboot and it was fine, haven’t tried to sleep again yet.  I did just change the hibernate mode to 5 (write to disk, don’t use ram, using secure virtual memory).  We’ll see how that goes - will let everyone know!

Josh

When I had the couple of problems I described previously, recovering from them through restarts was fine and no residual problems. Since my last update I have not had one additional “incident” hint of a problem. I’m using my MBP the way I always do… letting it sleep, restart every 3-5 days or so.

I use the paid version of SuperDuper to automatically save a bootable backup in case I do need to reinstall OSX on the SSD. I’ve updated to 10.6.3 and security update to the SSD with no problem.

Once a week or so I find for various reasons I need to boot to my internal MBP hard drive and when I do it’s like watching snow melt to wait for it to boot or load some programs. I love the Wintec 48GB SSD.

Yea I don’t think people are having sleep issues w/the wintek one, I of course bought the other Ugh, and I can’t return it.  I don’t want to drop another $170 on a wintek but the sleep issues are driving me craaaazy.

What updated did you have to do MacMac?

ootoaoo - 21 April 2010 09:13 PM

Yea I don’t think people are having sleep issues w/the wintek one, I of course bought the other Ugh, and I can’t return it.  I don’t want to drop another $170 on a wintek but the sleep issues are driving me craaaazy.

What updated did you have to do MacMac?

Sorry. I was kind of responding to your post plus in general interest updating my experience so far to anyone considering the SSD option and following or finding this topic. Didn’t intend the “I love my Wintec” to be a cheap shot or anything.

Unfortunately I’m not geeky enough to have feedback on the specific sleep problem you’re having.

Sadly I didn’t realize wintec IS Filemate.  Well just an update for all, my SSD died today, I set the thing up on Monday (so it lasted for 4 days).  Kind of sad IMO, requesting an RMA from Newegg, we’ll see how the next one goes.

I wish there were more options besides the wintec

I’m guessing that’s why you were having the sleep problems. The drive was bad from the start.

Hello SSD Gurus,

I too have been bitten by the SSD bug.  I wanted more space though, and thought I’d risk getting the “MyDigital” 64GB SSD.  I ordered it from Amazon and popped it in the expresscard slot, at first the Mac wouldn’t see it at all, so I checked Apple System Profiler which detected a card in the slot and said “Driver installed NO” so I pulled the driver dmg file down from MyDigital’s web site. I installed the driver and voila, there was the drive.  Partitioned it in Disk Utility to a GUID boot sector with HFS+ partitions 54GB for OSX to boot into, and a second 7GB partition for swap space to be used both by Mac OS X and for my Pagefile for XP when I boot into BootCamp to do PC Forensics.  So far so good. 

Next problem: Installing SL… I rebooted to install OSX from the SL DVD and no joy.  The SSD doesn’t show up as a valid drive even though it’s been GUID partitioned and HFS+ Formatted.  Sooo, to solve that problem, I booted back into OSX, built a disc image of the DVD, added the Driver.kext file to /Volume/System/Library/Extensions in the image file, then used CCC to copy the image to a brand new GUID Partitioned, formatted USB Thumb Drive.  Then booted the Thumb drive to install SL onto the SSD.  Once the SL Installer started, backed out to Terminal from the Utilities menu and manually loaded “kextload driver.kext” and voila, there was the drive in the drives list to install to.  Again, no problem.  The installation completes normally, everything looking hunky-dory, until I reboot, and neither with an Option-select start, nor in rEFIt does the SSD appear in the drives list.  When I’m in Mac OS booted from the 500GB Seagate 7200RPM drive, I can select the SSD as the boot drive, so it blesses properly but doesn’t wind up showing up at power on.

This is an Early 2006 MBP with 4GB of RAM.  I’ve tried updating from rEFIt 0.13 to 0.14 and that didn’t help.  What I suspect is that EFI is loading the ATA driver prior to loading the Expresscard slot driver, hence the drive list isn’t showing a valid drive in that slot because it’s already done probing.  Do any of you have any suggestions as to how to alter the order in which the EFI drivers load?  There’s nothing in the rEFIT.config file that will let you alter the order.  I’m not even sure what controls the boot order in EFI.  In the OF days you could manually assert the boot-device argument, but I’ve not found any information about these topics, and the rEFIt help information is not really clear on this, neither is the help for actual commands in the rEFIt shell.  I’ve even tried writing to Christoph Pfisterer and have yet to receive a reply.  I’m sure there’s got to be a relatively straightforward way to fix this, and I don’t understand why the FileMate SolidGo 48GB drive would show up in EFI and not the MyDigital drive.  In order to boot from your SSD the Expresscard Driver has to be loading prior to the ATA/IDE controller driver loading.  I can’t understand why it would work in one machine and not in another.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Tom

You can’t boot from 2006 models iirc

I believe you need like 2008+