Installing an SSD into a mac without replacing the HD

Parts Required

• A SSD 
• A caddy for the SSD to fit into the optical drive
• A external housing for the optical drive

SSD 

Purchased from http://macsales.com


I got one of these 

Quantity: 1 OWCSSDMX115, $199.99 each115GB Mercury EXTREME Pro 3G SSD 2.5" Serial-ATA 9.5mm Solid State Drive. High Performance internal MLC Flash storage with 11% Over Provisioned Redundancy. 3 Year OWC Warranty. 

These only run at 3Gb/s on the bus which is a bit slow these days however this fits my mid 2010 MBP to a T, there are more expensive SSD's and cheaper ones too. Other notable SSDs are

Crucial M4 but it may have compatibility problems with 17” MBP – something to do with SATA cable and interference at SATA3 speeds.

Optical Drive Caddy

There's cheap ones on ebay
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220788722995 - Optibay, not a great fit, needs some mods in the form of snaping off plastic and taking off metal backing. Very flimsy and no screws to attach hard drive.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=390312549808 – Not the neatest look but it works and is cheap.
Or expensive ones from macsales.com - http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DDAMBS0GB/

Bundles - Macsales have bundles available here

USB Case for Optical Drive

This cost $12 with postage - http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220595035019&ssPageName=ADME:L:OC:AU:1123

Cheap and nasty but works ok

Installation

Format SSD with the bootable filesystem (I forget which setting it is).
Carbon Copy Clone HDD to SSD without Music, Movies and other massive folders in your home drive.
Go to settings and set the boot drive to SSD rather than HDD.
Symlink ~/Music to HDD, etc.
Turn off sudden motion sensor
Turn off sleep hard drives
Turn off atime
Move sleepimage to HDD


I think that’s all.


Sometimes if the system doesn’t shut down gracefully for whatever reason, your symlinks go missing. Just remove /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD and reboot and it should mount correctly again. Haven’t worked out what causes this yet.

video testing

some text

Cool SSH tricks

Mac - ssh through a proxy

Ever needed to ssh through a proxy and didn't have putty handy/accessible/ported to your environment? Have no fear coz some smart cookie has written corkscrew which works hand in hand with the openssl ssh client to make all your tunnelling dreams come true.

http://www.agroman.net/corkscrew

Simply download, compile and install it (no seriously this has the easiest make process in the world - it's a credit to the developer) to say /usr/local/bin and then set up your ssh config file (in ~/.ssh/config) to look like this:

ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/corkscrew host-for-your-proxy.foo.bar 8080 %h %p

And if you need to authenticate, add the path the a file containing the credentials like so:

ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/corkscrew host-for-your-proxy.foo.bar 8080 %h %p ~/.ssh/proxy.auth

The auth file simply needs the following string:
username:password

Probably a good idea to chmod 600 your auth file

Easy.

Oracle Notes

To get the version of the db you are connected to:




select *

from v$version;

 

select *

from product_component_version;










Resuming a large secure file copy with rsyc

rsync --partial --progress --rsh=ssh user@host:remote_file local_file

should resume the copy after scp dies in the ar$e




ssh keys

http://rcsg-gsir.imsb-dsgi.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/documents/internet/node31.html

the target (ie the server you want to login to with out a password) needs the public key from the source host/user in the ~/.ssh/authorized_hosts file (or authorized_keys, depending on your os)

generate the public/private keys with ssh-keygen -t rsa

not really that hard, is it?