Feb
17
Notes from Installing an SSD on a Mac Pro
Inspired by this, I ordered an Intel X-25M 160GB SSD hard drive for my Mac Pro.
Some notes:
- I followed this guide.
- The drive comes with a 3.5” plate, but I didn’t realise this and bought a separate one too.
- I did my best to fit it into one of my 2 spare SATA hard drive enclosures in my Mac Pro, but the 3.5” plates situate the SSD connectors in the centre instead of to the left like the other drives. You could probably make it work if you had a really short male-female SATA and power cable. 2009 Mac Pros are apparently better wired for this (Mine is an Early 2008 model)
- I ended up leaving the drive loose in the spare optical drive enclosure. There are no moving parts in an SSD, so I’ll get away with it, but I may buy a 5 1/2” plate for it at some point.
- I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything but my /Users folder over to the SSD.
- I opened System Preferences, Accounts, right-clicked on my username and chose advanced options. This allowed me to tell the OS to use /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users for user data.
- I had a problem with iTunes authorisations — apparently these are stored in /Users/shared. Creating that folder on the SSD allowed me to re-authorise my iTunes. There’s probably a better way, but this works.
- My Snow Leopard, /Developer and /Applications folders altogether occupy almost 40GB in total. It’s nice to have a bit of spare fast storage, (I’m thinking: Aperture library, Xcode projects) but I could have spent 1/2 the money and still got all the benefits from the smaller 80GB drive. Lesson learned.
- It starts up from cold in about 35 seconds so I’m actually going to start shutting it down at night.
- Finder is snappy: big folders like /Applications load and scroll instantly.
- Applications like Mail, iTunes and Safari take one ‘bounce’ to open and gloriously, it’s way quieter than before.
