Everyone who is using a recent MacBook Pro should be doing this remarkable, cheap upgrade. You need an MBP with an Expresscard slot. And it needs to be bootable. Apparantly, Apple enabled this only when the moved to the Core2 Duo processor, designated as 3,1 and 4,1 models. When they went to the unibody MBP series, the Expresscard disappeared from all but the 17″ model.
But if you’re lucky enough to have an Expresscard 34 slot, hurry over to NewEgg and buy a 48 GB Expresscard SSD. It is without doubt the most remarkable upgrade I’ve ever done on a Mac. As I write this, its $106 dollars, free shipping. I got mine overnight from Edison NJ to here in Maryland.
You know how everyone is raving about the speed of the new MacBook Airs with their SSDs? Well this is a fast, PCI-E SATAII controlled drive. So you get an incredibly fast drive for just over a hundred dollars. It’s only 48 GB, but it turns out that a clean install of OS X 10.6 with basic apps is only 11 GB. Â So there’s room for some apps and documents, but not mass storage of photos, music and movies.
But who cares? There’s a built in drive for that. Brilliant !And which the MacBook air doesn’t have!
After making sure I had a good Time Machine backup of the internal drive, I formatted the Expresscard SSD with Disk Utility and used the 10.6 install disk to put a system on the drive. The only trick was to choose options to make sure no other languages or unnecessary printer drivers are installed.
Then just boot from the SSD and you’re good to go. I use syncing through mobile me, so Safari bookmarks, calendars and mail accounts all came along instantly. I pointed iTunes to the big library on the internal hard drive and all works fine.
So far, I’ve put my current project apps on the SSD: Tinderbox, Scrivener, and Evernote. So far I haven’t moved the Photography apps over.
Would I ever swap out the internal drive for and SSD? With 256 GB drives currently at $500, I’d much rather run my current configuration. In fact, I’d find it hard to move to a MacBook Air right now because I’d have to juggle storage more or move to a base Mac/ working portable configuration. Possible, but needed for now.
This is the future for PCs. We’re already enjoying it on the iPad and the MacBook Air is the next step. It will be interesting to see the evolution of storage in computers, but I can confidently predict we’ll be seeing SSDs feature prominently. Given the size of the actually parts compared to rotating magnetic drive, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the MacBook Pro revision come with both an SSD and magnetic storage.