More replacement drive questions
 

Following on from the recent thread about whether SSDs are "worth it" -- I have a 2009 MacBook with a 120Gb hard drive. The drive has only c. 25Gb free space, and there's probably a load more stuff I would want to put on it. I use my MacBook as my secondary Mac, mostly when travelling, and use my iMac when at home.

So, I was thinking of either going for a 180 GB SSD ... or:

For a hard drive, what is the performance gain from 5400rpm to 7200? (Would it be 33% faster?)
So although I could get an 180Gb SSD for £120; I could get a 7200 rpm HDD with 250Gb or 320Gb for around £50.

Any thoughts? I'd prefer to get a modest improvement for a small sum, if the improvement is noticeable.

We use Network Shares mainly for storage and at one site we decided rather than refreshing machines we would do 256GB SSD Hard Disk and RAM upgrades(4Gb and 8GB) for the machines that are 3/4 years old. It has been a huge success breeding new life into the equipment and the users are very happy.

We chose 256GB (Crucial M4) as we wanted enough headroom space wise but spending £270 per machine was a good investment IMHO. We also are repurposing some of the larger drives into the optical drive slot with a mount for the people that require more local storage.

My personal machine has a 512GB SSD and a 750GB (SSDF + HDD combo) which is very nice ;-)

As far as 7200 v 5400 it does help but it is nothing like the change to SSD. I never really felt the gain was anywhere near 33% more like 15-20% improvement.

OP - you didn't indicate anything about memory - but before doing anything concerning hard drives, I'd max out the memory in your machine. Some MBPs can take 16GB of RAM now through 3rd party options.

Assuming your RAM is maxxed out - if money is not an issue, get the SSD and a optical bay device that lets you put your current HD in the optical spot. If money is an issue, then same thing but get a new 7200 RPM drive for your main drive. In no case would I bother with a 5400 RPM drive.

Memory is 4GB, but seems doesn't seem a limiting factor at present. The machine is fine for speed, I'm just worried about running out of room of the hard drive, and so what to replace it with.

Money IS an issue -- not because I don't have it, but I'm planning to buy a new iMac (definitely an SSD there).

I don't think I could justify £270 on a 256Gb SSD, but I'm torn between the 180Gb Intel at £120 and a much larger 7200rpm HDD for £50.

Ok - well, given what you said (primary concern seems to be space), I would get the larger 7200rpm drive, and if budget allows, get an optical bay adapter for your current drive.

Can anyone say whether the need for keeping 10% of a hard drive free applies to SSDs, as well as hard drives? Obviously, some space for swap is required.

I would say there's really no hard and fast rule that applies in all situations for free space on a boot volume. Only a range of opinions for what has worked out well in the past, all the way back in history to the beginning of OS X....
That range is anywhere from that 10%, to as much as 25%. That would not seem too relevant now, with hard drives in the 2 - 4 Terabyte range very common. Would you need to leave 1TB free (or even the 10%, or 400 GB?). Seems a little over-thought with those huge volumes.
But, I think you are asking about an SSD, that (for cost purposes) won't be that enormous size. The system (on an SSD or a HD) still needs free space to work. If you need to allow for caches and the occasional large temp file, maybe for burning a dual-layer DVD, then 10% of a 180GB SSD might be a good target for the minimum free space. And, 10% is an easy number to remember, if you monitor that over the long term. Maybe there's better opinions from others....

I thought I'd attempt to add some real-world reference for you. I believe your iMac has the same key specs as my MacBook Pro. I figure, then, that this might give you some perspective on the speed gains from an SSD. My machine runs off an ExpressCard SSD (Wintec, 96 GB). When I switched to that about 20 months ago, I also replaced the internal HDD with a 7,200 RPM drive (Hitachi, 500 GB).

Every night, the SSD gets cloned to a partition on the HDD. I restarted and booted off the HDD. I opened an 11.3 MB InDesign file with 47 linked images, the largest of which is only 5 MB. Booting off the HDD, it took about 65 seconds for InDesign to be ready to use.

I quit InDesign and then opened a 37.8 MB TIF with Photoshop. That took about 21 seconds. Finally, I rebooted back into the SSD and repeated the above steps.

InDesign File: ~21 seconds
TIF File: ~11 seconds

If you'd like any additional comparison tests run, just let me know.

Edit: Meant to add this for certainty: My MacBook Pro has the 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of RAM, only 3 of which are addressable.

Thanks for all your comments. I think I probably will go for the SSD -- and also surprised how easy it is to switch the drive in old white MacBook. (Those were the days.)

Just bought an OCZ 240Gb drive (on eBay, new for £109!)

Trying to think through the data transfer process from the old drive to the new one:

I'll probably buy an external case for the old hard drive, but what's the best way to transfer the data? The Macbook does support Target mode, so I could use my iMac to copy over the data, using CCC. Or I could create an image of the entire HDD and put it on another external, without buying an external case.

My other thought is about creating the Lion Recovery partition. Can you create the Recovery partition only from the Lion installer? (i.e. without installing the OS in the main partition as well.) Or is there a way to duplicate all partitions on the original drive?

Any thoughts for the best way to go about it? Thanks.

I just sprang for an OWC 240GB Mercury Electra 3G SSD, an external enclosure for formatting it and cloning it (FW 800 & USB 3/2) and a tool kit for opening my MBP (Late 2008). After I've formatted and cloned the SSD in the external enclosure, I'll swap the SSD and the original HD between the machine and the enclosure. Looking forward to getting it.

I think it's crazy for laptop owners not to have an external enclosure - it's such a handy thing to have around. So anyway, I'd get one for sure.

As for how to do it - I like to boot from something OTHER than my source drive. You could make a USB key for this purpose if nothing else. Boot from that and clone all you want.

if money is not an issue, get the SSD and a optical bay device that lets you put your current HD in the optical spot. If money is an issue, then same thing but get a new 7200 RPM drive for your main drive. In no case would I bother with a 5400 RPM drive.

I agree.

In other news - I just got a TWO TERABYTE external drive with USB-3 for only $88 shipped (with another $91 paid with "points" from AmEx). That's just nuts how cheap stuff is now.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005HMKKH4/..._M3T1_ST1_dp_1

On a related note - I am finally ditching FW800 has a mandatory feature of external drives. My 2012 MBP makes it no longer necessary. I have some existing FW800 stuff to sell off now I guess (:

I intend to use it for backups. With 2 TB, I can do it often (:

I have bought an SSD -- but it's an OCZ Vertex Plus R2, and it isn't recognised by the ML installer. There seem to be some issues with OCZ SSDs, though it's possible that a Firmware update might fix it.

Anyway, I just restored my old hard disk in Disk Utility to the SSD, and it magically added the Recovery Partition at some point.

Works like a charm.

I would test you can boot off the recovery ;-) more than likely block level clone of entire device sorted it.

I should add normally we have had to lay down the Recovery partition when imaging Lion using Deploystudio but have not had the chance to start on 10.8 yet...coming soon...so maybe something changed in ASR that i am unaware of.

Cannot wait to move on from Lion has been a bit of a headache in my environments. 10.8 has certainly rounded off a lot of rough edges to X.

Well, I thought I only restored the "Laptop HD" partition, rather than the whole device. But yes, that seems sensible.

At the moment, something funny is happening with SpotLight indexing. Almost everything is throwing a sandbox error.

Have you only just updated ML ?

Many of the old Spotlight plugins are not compatible with ML new architecture and sandboxing policy.

ie. Spotlight plugins should be within the app bundle now.
For example all the Apple apps will have a Library folder within the bundle with Spotlight inside of that. Many developers are no where near to adhering to this policy hence the errors which i think can be ignored.

here is an example of Logic Pro 9.1.7

Progress report on an SSD.
 

I just got an OWC 240GB Mercury Electra 3G SSD, an external enclosure for formatting it and cloning it (FW 800 & USB 3/2). I put the SSD in the enclosure and did a clean install of Lion, then used the Migration Assistant (or whatever it's called now) to transfer Apps and User to it from the HD on my MBP. That's not foolproof -- an older version of Safari (5.4.1) showed up (sitting in the MBP's Apps folder) and it won't run in Lion. Dunno what happened to 6.0 which is what runs on the MBP's HD, so I cloned the MBP's HD to the SSD in the enclosure. When that was complete, all is as it should be so far, including Safari.

I will say that running the SSD from the enclosure via FW800 is actually faster than the 5400 rpm HD in the MBP.

Now to swap the SSD and the HD. That should be exciting for an old guy with arthritis. :)

No, I already had ML running on the HDD. I copied the entire hard drive over to the SSD with Disk Utility, running on an ML installer flash disk.

I don't think old plug-ins is the problem, as they all worked fine before. I've cleared all the caches and restarted after letting Spotlight re-index, but it's left thousands of log items. I'm not sure that all meta-data has been added.
For example, all my PostScript fonts threw sandbox related mdworker log errors. (Yes, the fonts have their resource forks!)

Follow-up
 

Wow -- what a difference in boot up. For those of you working with a 17" MacBook Pro (Models A1151 A1212 A1229 and A1261), I strongly recommend these directions: MacBook Pro 17" Models A1151 A1212 A1229 and A1261 Hard Drive Replacement. Aside from the difficulty in handling so many little screws with 75-year-old fingers, I got her done.

I hope that if I make it to 75 years old, I can get her done with my fingers too.

I have been using a Seagate Hybrid drive ( 4 GB SS + 7200 rpm 500Gb spinning platter ) for 18 months or so and have been very happy with it. It was so much faster than the installed 5400rpm supplied by apple.

I finally had the wherewithal to buy a SSD and went for the 180 GB Intel 520 ( couldn't afford the 250 GB). This is an awesome drive. I've got around the storage limit by moving a whole bunch of files ( which are so seldom accessed ) onto my original Seagate drive which sits in a 800 firewire connected external case.

I can see why people say they won't return to a platter drive after moving to an SSD. It makes everything so incredibly snappy. I've finally sorted the last block in the chain, my 2011 17" MBPro now runs at its best. This is definitely the best money i have spent in a while.

Yes, everything is "much snappier" now. Lengthy lists of files and folders, which used to take a moment to display in column view (the first time) are now instant.
I've got lots of large PDFs of many pages of scanned images, which I can now browse in QuickLook without any hiatus when scrolling through.
Large apps like Creative Suite are much faster to load, and "present themselves" a bit more surely when they finish loading. Also, it's much better at handling lots of things happening at once.
Battery life seems slightly improved, too. And it's silent.

It's certainly convinced me that I'll go for the SSD option in my next iMac, if there are any.

Yeah, I'd have put an SSD in my iMac if they hadn't been so darned expensive when I bought it -- still are from Apple. Although I don't mind disassembling a MBPro, I wouldn't tackle the iMac what with suction cups to pull off the glass, etc. That's out of my league. What I'm hoping for is a Thunderbolt SSD that I can hang externally but still get great speed.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt

I have installed a few SSDs into iMacs and it can be pretty scary for most users. I must admit i dread changing disks onsite in iMacs (had to do 6 recently....falling like flies 3.5 year old) as there is quite a bit that can go wrong although it only take 40 mins ;-) you certainly get a nervous sweat on ;-)

But in saying that a IT professional or Apple Technician should only charge £80 labour to do a drive swap tops....DeltaMac might chime in on that one.

My local Apple Dealer (not an Apple Store) won't install one of the available kits because it voids my warranty (which is still operative). But here's what Tom's Hardware says:

I've read the last part elsewhere, too. OWC has a kit for adding an SSD without taking out the HD that's there, but it's a tough DIY, so they recommend letting them do it.

Elgato has a 120GB Thunderbolt SSD for $300 (plus $60 for the cable) that's supposed to be quick.

The charge for a hard drive swap will vary depending on two main points.
The Mac model, and what needs to be done with software.
An older MacBook, with only the battery and a tiny panel in the way, takes only about 5 minutes tops.
A MacPro, maybe even less. I might not charge anything for labor on either of those, for a simple "old one out, new one in, and done (no software)", unless the customer brought in his own hard drive for us to install.
An older iBook (horrible little beasties!) I always charged for 1.5 hours of labor, even without software work. Then the little ribbon cable for the hard drive was very easy to damage, so very often there was more charge because of "collateral damage". That shop had a basic charge for data transfer for a single drive-to-drive transfer (not trying to be redundantly repetitious :D ) adding 1/2 hour labor charge. Yes, data copies take longer than that, but it's mostly just the equipment setup, then keep an eye on the process.
So - "£80 labour to do a drive swap tops..." - that sounds like a reasonable high end, when the hard drive/data is the only factor.

You left out two other points - supply and demand, and what the market will bear.

If everyone is charging $100, you're going to pay $100. If no one will pay $100, the rate will be less.

As for me - the minimum I would accept for installation in a laptop is $50 - for nothing other than swapping hard drives and ensuring the new one works (is installed properly). For an iMac - I wouldn't install that for anything less than $150, if at all.

Neither of the last two posters has mentioned an external drive, but I assume they us an external drive case to clone the internal to the external-soon-to-be-internal replacement.

One thing I haven't understood about that process is how you can be sure that the rescue partition is put on the new drive. Not knowing that, I installed Lion from a DVD I had made and then cloned the old (internal) to the new (external) and then swapped them. Glad to know that I saved myself something between $100 and $150 by doing it myself.

I didn't say those were the only criteria for service labor charges - just the main ones. What YOU may charge is usually controlled by The Boss. In my case, I am The Boss, so I charge what I choose to call a reasonable amount. That is mostly determined by my estimate of the job time, and the care that is needed for the replacement.
I give quotes before the repair commences. If the customer accepts the quote, then that's what I charge. If they don't accept the quote, then we decide on a more equitable charge (probably with fewer options on the final job), or the customer goes elsewhere.
I also expect that you have never had an old iBook apart... It's much more challenging than any iMac. I counted once - there's 50 screws to remove to get to the hard drive on a typical iBook. How many screws do you remove to get at the hard drive on an A1181 MacBook. That would be "none".
You would be fine on newer Apple laptops, and not so good on those prior to MacBooks.

I've been in and out of a lot of iMacs, from the old bondi-blue iMac, to the latest ones. There's easy - the first G5 iMac; to challenging - the iSight iMac G5, and then the white intel iMacs. The newer iMacs, which need suction cups to get at the display? not so bad... But, I'm expecting that Apple will continue with making Macs more difficult to repair - waiting for a retina display iMac to be mostly a sealed unit. $150 for repair labor on something like that? It'll probably seem cheap... :D

The first Mac I opened was an SE/30. I installed a Dayna ethernet adapter plugged into its Processor Direct Slot through a PDS adapter. It still works, though I did have to frig with it CRT settings when the image began to shrink. Since then I've upgraded or repaired a 7100/66, a Beige G3 to a G4, a B&W G3, and a PM G5 so I wasn't disturbed to open a MBP.

I was worried about this, but I ended up with a Restore partition, though I'm not sure quite how it happened. I partitioned the disk to HFS+, journaled; and then restored the original hard drive partition. (I though it was the partition, rather than the whole drive). Anyway, it all works now.

What's weird is that the Recovery partition and my USB thumb drive with Mountain Lion installer both seemed to have selected and signed into my wireless router, which has a password. There are several other wireless routers that they could have chosen nearby, including some freebies, so how did two completely unrelated disks "know" my preference -- and possibly the password?

I am also The Boss - and I charge a blend of what I think is reasonable (often less than market), market rate, and what the client is willing to pay. Generally speaking, I'm cheap.

My first one was a Mac Plus - upgrading it from 1MB to 4MB, which required clipping a couple of resisters on the motherboard - talk about an operation that makes you nervous about screwing up! I don't remember how much I charged, but it probably should have been more.

The scariest part of those Classic Macs was the CRT voltage ~1500 volts, so adjusting any of the analog stuff on the motherboard required reaching past that. Adjusting the screen size was easy, though -- just start an app with an on screen ruler and compare to an external one.