Automagisk blog

I was tired of needing to connect an external drive to my MacBook to access my image archive, and was planning to buy a 1TB drive to swap with my Apple-supplied 320GB. Then I came across the MCE OptiBay adapter that makes it possible to swap out the MacBook’s built-in DVD burner with a second drive, freeing up the standard HDD bay for an SSD.

I now have 800GB of storage in my MacBook, split between a speedy 160GB SSD and a 640GB regular hard drive. Great success!

Apple Disk Utility showing the two internal drives: 160GB “MacBook SSD” and the 640GB “Snurre” HDD (as well as a few external drives connected).

I was originally planning to swap the 320GB drive with a regular 1TB drive and keep the DVD, but after reading the speed of SSD drives I quickly decided I needed wanted one.

There are good SSDs and bad SSDs, and after some intensive research on the interweb, I decided for the Intel X25M 160GB. It has received a lot of good reviews, it’s reasonably big (for now), and the price is ok – for a SSD.

Why 640GB?

Why not put a 1TB drive in the optibay? Because it only has space for 9.5mm drives, and the 750GB and 1TB drives available are 12.5mm. They will not fit in the optibay. It is possible to put a 12.5mm drive in the normal hard drive bay, but that means no SSD speed (if the SSD is used as a system drive in the optibay, the MacBook will not “hibernate” properly if the battery is completely drained).

How fast is it?

Fast! Boot time is greatly reduced and applications can be started simultaneously and load very quickly. I haven’t timed it, but Lightroom loads much, much faster than it without the SSD. Read How to make your Mac feel lighting-fast for some more details:

After using the Intel X25-M 80GB solid state drive for several months as a boot drive in my Mac Pro, I’m never going back to a hard drive (for my boot drive).

Super-fast system boot is the norm, and launching apps is spectacularly fast: launch every app you’ve got and they’ll all be ready for use in a few seconds. Try that with a hard drive—coffee break time.

Installation

It took me about 10 minutes for the full install. MCE supplies the screwdriver, and there’s a CD with a PDF with illustrations and text.

Here are the contents of the MCE OptiBay kit:

From the left: USB cable and USB power cable (not needed), screws, screwdriver pen, Enclosure for the DVD drive when removed from MacBook, Western Digital 640GB hard drive (bought separately, but MCE also sells hard drives), CD with instructions and the optibay adapter itself.

Tha MacBook ready to have it’s DVD drive swapped with the 640GB hard drive:

The DVD player is in the top left corner, attached with 4 screws and one flimsy cable in a tiny socket. It’s the red/brown cable in front of the fan.

I highly recommend having an extra MacBook to read the installations instructions on..

The DVD player slides easily into the enlosure, and I haven’t bothered attaching it with any screws – mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to. There is no faceplate, so it does look a little rough.

There several how-to videos available on the interweb, such as this very nice one from Steve Trotto:

Where do I keep all the stuff?

• SSD: Mac OS X, Applications, Lightroom catalog, Lightroom previews, Documents.
• HDD: Image files (pretty much every photo I have, except some time-lapse), iTunes music (might have to put some of the 100+ GB on an external drive, though..), a few movies and TV shows.
• External RAID-1 drive: Backup of all images, backups of Lightroom catalog, all the accounting stuff for Automagisk, misc. important files.
• Other external drives: Movies, music, misc. stuff.

What’s next?

SSDs will get cheaper and cheaper, and I might replace either the SSD or HDD with something bigger when “necessary”.

What else?

ChronoSync is the best backup sofware I have found for Mac OS, and Carbon Copy is great for cloning drives.

And: MCE does not answer emails. And: FedEx needed 7 days (and USD 50) to bring the package from California to Norway.

More information

I highly recommend reading these articles to get some SSD knowledge:

• The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD (AnandTech)
• Intel X25M 160GB Solid State Drive (SSD) (Macintosh Performance Guide)
• Reconditioning a solid state drive (SSD) (Macintosh Performance Guide)

Possibly related posts

1. Backup of images, Lightroom catalog and other things using RAID, rsync, etc When image archives consisted of albums with negatives or cassettes with slides, having a good archiving system was crucial, otherwise it would be very difficult to find anything. With digital...