46 replies to this topic

[kevpan815]

Bought The One That They Reccommended For My Mid Year 2010 Mac Mini. Had 2 Pay $19.99 for Overnight Shipping, but if everything goes according to plan with both the Credit Card Verification and The Home Address Verification, It should be here by 12 P.M. Tomorrow. There was no way that I was going to buy a SSD from Apple, after all the only one that they have for sale is $999.99! As for the Crucial SSD from Crucial.com, it was $132.99 for a 128 GB SSD Plus $9.00 for Tax, and $19.99 for Over Night Shipping.

[Tyler R.]

Congrads. An SSD was one of my best upgrade ever.

[kevpan815]

Tyler R., on 03 December 2012 - 14:27, said:

Congrads. An SSD was one of my best upgrade ever.

I just hope that this Upgrade is going to Speed Up my Mac, all the 8 GB's of Ram Upgrade did was it stopped the Temp Files from building up on Shutdown. By the way: The Solid State Drive was actually $123.99 NOT $132.99! I do have one question about Solid State Drives, however: According to Crucial.Com, you need to Partition the SSD before you start using the Device as the primary Hard Drive, and it was even telling me in some spots on their Website that it may be better to use the SSD as an External Hard Drive and NOT pull the Original Hard Drive out of the Computer. Is this true that I don't partition the Drive first before trying to use it, that it will fail to detect the SSD?

[Tyler R.]

kevpan815, on 03 December 2012 - 16:38, said:

I just hope that this Upgrade is going to Speed Up my Mac, all the 8 GB's of Ram Upgrade did was it stopped the Temp Files from building up on Shutdown. By the way: The Solid State Drive was actually $123.99 NOT $132.99! I do have one question about Solid State Drives, however: According to Crucial.Com, you need to Partition the SSD before you start using the Device as the primary Hard Drive, and it was even telling me in some spots on their Website that it may be better to use the SSD as an External Hard Drive and NOT pull the Original Hard Drive out of the Computer. Is this true that I don't partition the Drive first before trying to use it, that it will fail to detect the SSD?

I've never owned a Cricial before, but I assume you just format the drive in the OS X installer as normal and your on your way. I'd just Google it. <model drive> <OS X version> install instructions. Maybe an actual owner would be able to help you more.

Also be sure to enable trim:
http://osxdaily.com/...-mac-os-x-lion/
http://www.anandtech...x-lion-released

[Mark]

kevpan815, on 03 December 2012 - 16:38, said:

I just hope that this Upgrade is going to Speed Up my Mac, all the 8 GB's of Ram Upgrade did was it stopped the Temp Files from building up on Shutdown. By the way: The Solid State Drive was actually $123.99 NOT $132.99! I do have one question about Solid State Drives, however: According to Crucial.Com, you need to Partition the SSD before you start using the Device as the primary Hard Drive, and it was even telling me in some spots on their Website that it may be better to use the SSD as an External Hard Drive and NOT pull the Original Hard Drive out of the Computer. Is this true that I don't partition the Drive first before trying to use it, that it will fail to detect the SSD?

I'm not sure if it's still the case but when Snow Leopard 10.6.8 was released, you had to use a little hack to enable trim on 3rd party drives. I'd look into that.

As for performance, I think you'll be blown away

[threetonesun]

kevpan815, on 03 December 2012 - 16:38, said:

I just hope that this Upgrade is going to Speed Up my Mac, all the 8 GB's of Ram Upgrade did was it stopped the Temp Files from building up on Shutdown. By the way: The Solid State Drive was actually $123.99 NOT $132.99! I do have one question about Solid State Drives, however: According to Crucial.Com, you need to Partition the SSD before you start using the Device as the primary Hard Drive, and it was even telling me in some spots on their Website that it may be better to use the SSD as an External Hard Drive and NOT pull the Original Hard Drive out of the Computer. Is this true that I don't partition the Drive first before trying to use it, that it will fail to detect the SSD?

No. Just boot from the OS installer (USB or CD) and run disk utility from there.

[kevpan815]

threetonesun, on 03 December 2012 - 17:57, said:

No. Just boot from the OS installer (USB or CD) and run disk utility from there.

Thanks for the Reply. I'll have to give your post a Like once I am up and running again (I am using my Mobile Browser at the moment due to the fact that I am currently in the process of going to Line 0 on my old OEM 5400 RPM SATA Hard Disk Drive). As for my OEM Snow Leopard CD, it will most likely no longer work any more due to the fact that Apple gave me a 32 Bit Disk and my system now has 8 GB's of OEM RAM, instead of 2 GB's of OEM RAM. I do however have a Mac OS X Lion Mini USB Thumb Drive (from Apple, you know, the ones that used to cost $69.99 before they made Mac all Download Only with ML, so that should work. One question that I do have however is it possible to install Apple Boot Camp on an SSD?

Mark, on 03 December 2012 - 17:25, said:

I'm not sure if it's still the case but when Snow Leopard 10.6.8 was released, you had to use a little hack to enable trim on 3rd party drives. I'd look into that.

As for performance, I think you'll be blown away

I will no longer be using my OEM Snow Leopard Disk due to the fact that it's 32 Bit and I now have 8 GB's of RAM in this Machine. I will have to give your post a Like however for that little tip about Snow Leopard just as soon as I am back up and running. :-)

[kevpan815]

Tyler R., on 03 December 2012 - 17:19, said:

I've never owned a Cricial before, but I assume you just format the drive in the OS X installer as normal and your on your way. I'd just Google it. <model drive> <OS X version> install instructions. Maybe an actual owner would be able to help you more.

Also be sure to enable trim:
http://osxdaily.com/...-mac-os-x-lion/
http://www.anandtech...x-lion-released

What exactly is Trim? I am very scared about hacking software and equipment that may cause both my Apple Care Extended Warranty and my Crucial Warranty's to be Voided!

[+warwagon]

You'll love it. Once you go SSD you'll never go back. Every single one of my systems has an SSD. There is one down side to them though. From the moment you first use an SSD every system you use that has a traditional spinning hard drive will seem dog slow!.

[threetonesun]

kevpan815, on 03 December 2012 - 19:35, said:

One question that I do have however is it possible to install Apple Boot Camp on an SSD?

Sure, why not?

FYI, if you're going to install Boot Camp, do it immediately after installing Mountain Lion (unless you're recovery from Time Machine in which case, disregard). I've had issues on two recent computers where ML has said it couldn't partition the drive for boot camp, and it's required a full re-imaging from Time Machine to fix it.

[Tyler R.]

kevpan815, on 03 December 2012 - 19:40, said:

What exactly is Trim? I am very scared about hacking software and equipment that may cause both my Apple Care Extended Warranty and my Crucial Warranty's to be Voided!

Trim is the SSD's garbage collection feature. If you do not enable it, it could wear and stress your SSD which will slow down your computer over time. You aren't "hacking" anything. You are enabling a software feature that makes your drive last longer and stay snappy-- it has nothing to do with any hardware.

[+Chicane-UK]

You'll never look back - honestly. I have SSD's in everything now for OS drives and most speed critical applications. Every time I go back to a PC with a mechanical disk it almost feels like there's something wrong with it!

[Tuishimi]

Quote

You'll love it. Once you go SSD you'll never go back. Every single one of my systems has an SSD. There is one down side to them though. From the moment you first use an SSD every system you use that has a traditional spinning hard drive will seem dog slow!.

This is why I haven't made the leap yet. That and I need a ton of space. But for my system drive... a 256 or maybe start saving for a 512. Can you safely stripe two 256 drives together, by the way? Will they maintain their efficiency?

[kevpan815]

Thank you guys for your help. What the Crucial Website basically said was that when you buy the disk it comes to you with 0 Partitions Created on the SSD and that Windows and/or Mac Setup Programs will NOT detect the disk if you don't use either Disk Management from an EXISTING Windows Installation and/or Disk Utility from a Mac to first create a Hard Drive Partition before installing either Windows and/or Mac. From their help documents online, it does sound like it is easier to install a Mac OS on it rather than a Windows Install. It does sound like the other posters comment was correct that I can just use my Mac OS X Lion Mini USB Stick to install the OS with Lion as a starter. From the other guys post about Garbage Collection, I assume that I need to Upgrade from Lion to Mountain Lion first, then install Garbage Collection, or is that wrong? Thanks in Advance. Unfortunately while I do currently have Mac OS X Lion on a USB Stick, I will have to Re-Download Mountain Lion from the App Store before I can install it on my Mac.

[kevpan815]

It also does sound like the SSD does come with some Manufacturer Software called Dataplex. I don,t know if this is the so called Garbage Collection Software or NOT, but there is a mention of the Software using a Product Key System on their Website so they apparently don't want you handing out the software to other people!