- 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.comI 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 ebayhttp://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.
