SSD drive for macbookpro

opinion guy

So thinking to replace my 2009 macbookpro's hdd 250Gb with a ssd 250Gb for a bit of a speed boost.

I'm wondering so - which make to go for ?
Sata II or Sata III or does it matter in a 2 year old machine ?

fasty

SATA II. Something with a Sandforce based controller like the OCZ Vertex 2. It'll make up for the current lack of TRIM support in OSX for non Apple SSDs.

opinion guy

Ok I'll check that out then.

Hmm next question - my current disk is partitioned with one partition running windows NT.
ok transferring my mac osx to the new disc is easy i'll just use time machine and a boot disc - but how to transfer the bootcamp partition ??

I know i could use macfuse/ntfs-3g to allow time machine to backup the bootcamp partition - but I have my doubts that it will be so simple to restore to the new drive.

Any thoughts ?

fasty

Disk Utility will clone a drive at block level. You could use Bootcamp Utility to create an equal sized partition on your new SSD and clone it?

opinion guy

fasty wrote: »

Disk Utility will clone a drive at block level. You could use Bootcamp Utility to create an equal sized partition on your new SSD and clone it?

Yeah sounds like a plan. I have a drive case anyhow so I should be able to clone the drive before swapping it out and if it doesn't work just swap back and try another method...i think

Edit: Actually wait will that work ? Will Disk Utility allow me to directly clone a whole drive to a new drive ?

Padgeman

opinion guy wrote: »

Edit: Actually wait will that work ? Will Disk Utility allow me to directly clone a whole drive to a new drive ?

I would try SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner if I was going to clone my drive at all.

fasty

opinion guy wrote: »

Yeah sounds like a plan. I have a drive case anyhow so I should be able to clone the drive before swapping it out and if it doesn't work just swap back and try another method...i think

Edit: Actually wait will that work ? Will Disk Utility allow me to directly clone a whole drive to a new drive ?

Sure. It's just a user interface for dd. It copies data at a block level, not a file level.

The poster above suggested a few utilities that make it easier though.

opinion guy

Yeah but my googling leads me to beleive those tools won't clone the windows partition.

winclone apparently will do this.
anyhow drive is ordered so there will be some experimentation ahead

Sad Professor

A warning about Winclone: it is no longer being developed. I used to use it but had awful problems trying to get it to restore under 10.6. Tried everything and it wouldn't work. In the end I had to go back to my old Mac and convert my Bootcamp partition to a VMWare virtual disk. If I ever want a Bootcamp partition again I'll have to reinstall Windows from scratch. The Winclone image that I made as a backup was useless under SL.

opinion guy

Sad Professor wrote: »

A warning about Winclone: it is no longer being developed. I used to use it but had awful problems trying to get it to restore under 10.6. Tried everything and it wouldn't work. In the end I had to go back to my old Mac and convert my Bootcamp partition to a VMWare virtual disk. If I ever want a Bootcamp partition again I'll have to reinstall Windows from scratch. The Winclone image that I made as a backup was useless under SL.

Ah cool thanks for that SP.
I'll try the other options so

opinion guy

New question.
Give that the SSD will give me a speed boost - how much of that will I los if I encrypt my hard drive. I sometimes travel with my macbook and have wanted to encrypt it but didn't so far because of the performance loss. Will an encrypted SSD still be faster than an unencrytped HDD or no ?

opinion guy

SSD in my hands:D

opinion guy

Hmmm I'm thinkin I have no choice but to use winclone

opinion guy

ARGHGG

My MBP won't recognise the vertex2 ?!?!
What the hell ???

Sad Professor

Is it showing up in Disk Utility? You need to format it first before the Mac installer will recognise it.

Sad Professor

Any luck with this, opinion guy?

opinion guy

Been busy since - not got back to it!
Will let you know don't worry

opinion guy

Hey
So first restore didn't work - was getting kernal panics

So i booted from DVD again, then instead of doing a straight restore I reinstalled leopard, that worked. So then i upgraded to snow leopard - that worked. So then I though ok I'll try restore again. So left that running and went to bed. Up this morning and rebooted and its working fine

THanks for the help SP

Sad Professor

Glad you got it sorted.

I suspect the problem may have been that drive wasn't formatted using the GUID partition table, which is needed for a drive to be bootable on an Intel Mac. Afaik the SL install disc does this by default when formatting a drive as HFS+, but previous install discs didn't less you were doing a clean install.

opinion guy

Sad Professor wrote: »

Glad you got it sorted.

I suspect the problem may have been that drive wasn't formatted using the GUID partition table, which is needed for a drive to be bootable on an Intel Mac. Afaik the SL install disc does this by default when formatting a drive as HFS+, but previous install discs didn't less you were doing a clean install.

Ah thanks Prof - good to know.

I've just got the windows partition running now too
Used winclone to backup as an image on my mac so once I did the Time Machine restore on the new drive I made a windows partition, used winclone to restore to that. The only minor problem was the Parallels didn't couldn't find the drive it was looking for so all I had to do was make a new virtual machine on parallels and amazingly enough that worked!!!:D

So windows up and running and my programs work

And windows is now MUUCCCCCHHHHHHH faster :D:D:D:D